I’m far beyond the point of irritation now when I hear people say “Vim is too hard”, or “Vim sucks”.
Really? Is it Vim that sucks or your complete lack of either desire or capability (both of which are inexcusable) to learn Vim that sucks. To anyone who says that Vim is too hard to learn, so was your current job description (presuming you’re employed) until you started doing the work. Now it’s part of your every day, or at least it should be (again, the presumption of a full time job).
Let’s use me as an example, because why the hell not- I’m the only data point I have access to right now- When I learnt Vim I was your garden variety front end web developer, that HTML and CSS guy who knew exactly how to make the pretty things that all clients want but didn’t quite know enough of the black magic behind the scenes to not make the server fall over every now and again.
It took me a matter of a week (and that’s being somewhat modest) to be comfortable enough to run Vim, make a change (or changes) to a file and close out the file after writing said changes. It took a few additional weeks to learn the yank / paste keys and maybe another month or so to be accross the whole “flying around the document” thing that everyone seems to be so incredibly fearful of.
After a while, the shortcuts become second nature, the downside of which is typing :wq to save a Word Document and then wondering why your hours of work got lost after a power outage…
But that passes…
usually…
it can take some time…
I’ve just made myself sad again…
I’m also sick of those who wont learn it because it’s not an IDE, i.e.: it wont fix your problems for you or pretend to know what you’re thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll use an IDE if I have to, but the amount I really need to is severely outweighed by my desire to learn all of its many individual shortcuts and I’m just far too busy to even try (I really want to not add a “geddit” or equivalent here, but I’m legitimately fearful of flames and less than clever people).
In summary, learn Vim- if you use Linux workstations or manage Linux servers as even 20% of your job, you just might become a more efficient human being, and who doesn’t love the idea of that.
I couldn’t agree more. Vim is a fantastic tool that perfectly suits its purpose. It’s terribly efficient and usually available in most server environments (where I use it the most). I can jump in and make corrections to any file without thinking – and as you said – as the short-cuts are now second-nature.
There is a learning curve to vim, just as there is with anything worth doing. I struggled with not hating Regular Expressions until I succeeded in punishing those bad-boys with (superior|ninja) regexp? skill[z].
Vim ftw.