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Comment by nakkiel | Hacker News Reader

How is this supposed to help anyone exactly? Many commands simply don't work (^ or $ to name just two). People: skip this and use vim's :help.

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This is an extremely common problem in vim-like implementations that aren't actually vim. Vim emulators in IDEs are a huge culprit for this. Just missing one command can be very painful (for example this website doesn't enable using / as a movement command). In the end I learned to always use vim itself.

Yes, I'd go as far as suggesting pure terminal vim-full install with its help files and a minimal config.

Author here. Sorry about that. I didn't mean that this should get into the wild this fast.

I fixed the link (I had renamed Bitbucket repository).

Also, it is not supposed to cover the whole of Vim. Just enough to get you started without getting scared away immediately.

Also, thanks for the $ (it should work mostly but I haven't covered all the different browsers; try alt-gr+4)

^ is also a handy shortcut, and usually more useful for programmers than 0. It goes to the first non-whitespace character in a line.

Thank you. As I'm not experienced user of Vim myself, this kind of feedback is valuable.

I use _ for that. It's easier to type (at least in spanish keyboards).

I always just use I (capital i) for that.

I reported an issue related to the $ command:

https://bitbucket.org/egaga/open-vim/issue/1/tutorial-sectio...

I've tried to learn vi for years. The simplicity of this tutorial is the first thing that allowed me to "get it." Maybe I'm just ready at last, but the quick tutorial gave me just enough beyond what I needed to know before (i/r/:wq) to grasp its power. I've tripled my vi knowledge without being intimidated.

Years didn't do it but less than 40 minutes (since this was published) got you in. I'm either missing something or you haven't put your time to good use.

Try vimtutor in your terminal. It's supposed to take 30 minutes.

You'll miss a lot of things from the tutorial the first time but you can come back to it as often as needed. You also shouldn't go any further than the tutorial until everything in it makes sense. Once you're at that point, you'll be autonomous for finding new commands and a happy vim user.

I may sound mad but seriously, what's with the a-web-app-for-everything madness?

The reason it being on web is that it's a low barrier to try out, and it concentrates on the first steps; in my opinion, systems should provide a gradually progressive way to learn them.

Sounds like someone pissed in your Wheaties this morning. Anything to get more people to give vim/the vim style of doing things a chance is always cool in my book.

Point taken, however I work sometimes in a large open plan office with administered win7 pcs and command prompt disabled. I can use this site to do some practice for a ten minute burst with headphones on just as an 'interaction break'.

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