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Comment by manuscreationis | Hacker News Reader

It seems quite powerful, but overall vi still overwhelms me with all the options and functionality...

I'm trying to learn more about vi/m (and emacs) as I get more into Linux development, but I think a lifetime of Windows has damaged me, mentally

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In fact learning vi/m is a lot like learning to play a music instrument.

It is a pain to start using vim. But if you reach a certain level you start improving more and more. Concerning vim, it should takes some weeks to be as efficient than with notepad.

I written this article which also might help you:

http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

Don't give up! It will pay faster than you think.

I read your article a few days ago, great stuff. I agree vim is a pain in the beginning, and I only recently went to using it full time. But even after two weeks of full time use a lot of the commands are already starting to get "embedded" in my fingers.

"In fact learning vi/m is a lot like learning to play a music instrument."

If thats the case, I am screwed

Honestly, when I was younger, I used to use vim when collaborating with other programmers to impress them, and then use an IDE most of the time when noone was looking. But then something strange happened, I began building up the muscle memory and eventually preferred using vim over an IDE. It seems like every year, if I take the time to learn more about vim, I become twice as effective as the year before. There seem to be an infinite amount of new things to learn, constantly making my life easier. I've been with it 4 years now, and will never go back to an IDE.

The coolest thing I learned this year is the '. command, which will go to your last change. So, you can be editing a program/script, run it, and it has an error. Most of the time you want to go back to the last modification, so just type: '. This even works, at least on my system, after closing and re-opening the file. Related to that, you can type g; and g, to go through next/previous modifications.

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