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Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of weird to read about "learning" VIM, at least from someone who's been using it (er VI) for 40 years.

It's nuts, but if asked, I don't even know how to do certain things in VI; I just do them. Ask me what keys to press to go up, or down, or right or left? I dunno - I just do it. Yea it's nuts. It's like baby duckling bonding - the first editor mindset (aka EMACS vs VI) you use, you just bond to and it just is natural. Not better, just natural.

At the same time, I don't utilize it to its full strength. I probably do things that seem laborious to some, but no big deal to me.

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Slight tangent, but what's with the capitalization of VI and VIM?

You surely know those are not acronyms, yet I've seen VIM miscapitalized many times, even by experienced users, and it's always slightly irritating.

EMACS, while historically accurate, also isn't common anymore.

If you're old enough, you may have started using it on a terminal that was all-caps.

The very first sentence of wikipedia: "Vim (/vɪm/;[5] a contraction of Vi IMproved)"

I see a way to get "VIM" out of that.

Though it looks like originally, in 1993, you'd have read: "Vi IMitation":

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sources.misc/c/Q34bWDtDIM8

My vim history is much like yours. I’ve tried to learn more about its features but unless they made their way into my daily workflow immediately, I just as easily forget them. Finally, I threw in the towel and decided I knew enough to get my work done and stopped.

Ha this is so true. I wrote in a comment elsewhere in this thread that I mostly just use the movement keys hjkl with a fast key repeat. But I'm still kind of wondering whether the movement keys are actually hjkl, because I'm writing this on my phone so I can't check whether those are actually the keys I use to move around, and I haven't actually thought about it in like a decade.

Same here. I remember vi commands as finger movements on the keyboard. Example formatting a block of text is !}fmt but I can't remember it except as a sequence of key presses. It was hard even to get the actual sequence of characters for this comment.

edit: clarity

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