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Comment by icc97 | Hacker News Reader

All these tutorials are like taking beginner French. If you want to learn French live in France. If you want to learn Vim you have to live in it. Use it for your development full time. Then over time you start to see it's power.

For me on Windows, GVim was the only sane option. Mostly because the Windows console can't fully handle syntax highlighting / italics. However it's also a good transition world. You've got all the power of Vim but quite a few of the commands you'd expect still work. I've practically never need them but it's handy to reduce the confusion / frustration

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I fully agree with you, however some people are worried by the loss of their daily productivity especially if they are used to using their mouse a lot, for those I will recommend to start learning vim in their browser to surf mouse-free using plugins like SurfingKeys[1], vimium[2](chrome), Vimperator[3](Firefox). Once used to surf without reaching to the mouse and know the essential vim key, you'll be ready to use vim daily for your dev work, without a big loss in initial productivity.

[1] https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys

[2] https://vimium.github.io/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimperator/

I cannot recommend SurfingKeys highly enough; it's a phenomenal extension.

I'm glad GVim works well for you in windows.

Personally I like the simplicity of characters-in-characters-out that comes with working with vim in a terminal. I also like to be able to exit to bash and do redirection trickery on my recently saved files. For these reasons, I avoid GVim.

MSYS2 (which uses MinTTY for its terminal) is what I use, and as far as I've noticed it supports all the bells and whistles that the windows terminal lacks.

Yeah definitely, I regarded it as a failure to fall back to GVim. But my sanity and productivity was at stake.

I did spend a lot of time in Vim in DOS and loved the fact that it was even possible to do something productive there.

But I just started wasting more and more time on little details that didn't quite work.

It's even more frustrating when you compare to how perfectly it works in the Linux command line. Certainly in Linux I'll use regular Vim.

I've used very little of the GVim commands and got rid of the ugly menu so it looks like regular Vim.

But I have utmost respect for GVim for being forgiving and kind to a new user.

GVim works quite well with Powershell. I used it heavily a year ago when I was on a console crusade.

Put this in your $profile and you can open it just by calling "vim":

Set-Alias vim "C:\Utilities\vim74\vim.exe"

Both powershell and the dos prompt still go through the console. It's quite amazing to have Vim running in a native Windows prompt but when you use it full time the little things start to get to you.

If you can't go to France start by changing all your locales to French. Computer, phone, TV, everything.

Sublime Text comes with a vim plugin. It isn't a perfect copy though.

The Ubuntu shell on Windows 10 comes with vim and syntax highlighting.

As far as I know, the Ubuntu shell still uses the console. There is indeed highlighting but basically only 8 colours that are dubiously split to make 16. A recent Windows update was supposed to give 256 colours but I tried and couldn't get it to work. Even then though you still haven't got bold or italics. It's these little things that I missed.

I use Mintty and it has 256 colors. Not sure about bold and italics.

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