Vim University - Screencasts and Articles for Serious Vim Students | Hacker News Reader

Vim University - Screencasts and Articles for Serious Vim Students

vimuniversity.com

270 pointsmcobrien34 comments

Hey all.

I'm the author of the site and totally agree that RSS is desperately needed. It's next on my list.

thanks!

Would just like to mention these: http://vimeo.com/6999927

These videos cover most of the basics and show the true power of vim. They would be a great warm-up course before taking on OP's videos.

Wyatt's sense of humor really makes his videos (and Vim) accessible.

If you're hungry for more, http://vimcasts.org/ is awesome, but sadly hasn't been updated in a while.

I think that's mostly because the author is writing a book on Vim currently.

Screencasts may take some time and effort to produce. However, someone should really continue the Daily VIM tip blog: http://dailyvim.blogspot.com/

The site offers a newsletter and Twitter, I'd much rather have a feed to subscribe to. Is it hidden/is anybody working on, for example, a Yahoo Pipe?

I second that, it's 2012 and I don't maintain a list of websites I check everyday for updates :)

Ironically, I do maintain a list of websites that I check every day for updates.

I think RSS is the greatest thing since sliced white bread, and it was killing me. I literally once spent an entire unemployed day reading what was in my reader. When I got to the end there was more, and I just kept rolling that rock up the hill. So that particular tool is wide open for abuse by me. "You can just skim the subject lines" never meant anything to me, it's all just so damned interesting.

My solution was to kill my reader, put a few "daily" bookmarks in my toolbar (this is one of them), and put a bunch of sites in an "often" folder which I'll browse when I have time. Which works better for me. Most people probably don't have this problem.

I hace also been overloaded with things to read in my feed reader. I'm constantly cutting and adding feeds to try and keep the volume down. After all, I cannot read everything and am probably not interested in most of it.

Our generation and probably generations to come will have to think of creative ways to manage the large ammount of information we are confronted with on a daily basis. Perhaps coming to the realization that you cant follow and stay current with everything (I am not there yet).

I think on of the main problems in this area is, that if you personalize the information too much you'll live in a bubble. Thus you need to find a way to include important news outside of it.

After the reading 'the power of less' I trimmed the number of feeds in Google Reader down to 10 + comment feeds for my own sites.

If I find a new feed I want to subscribe to I have to choose another to remove in its place. For instance instead of following different blogs which may occasionally discuss vim I follow the RSS feed for the VimLinks twitter account as my sole source of vim news.

This means I only follow the sites I'm most interested in but I spend longer reading new articles from them. For everything else, if something is interesting enough it usually bubbles to the top of HN or twitter.

Do people here have suggestions about how to best make vim screencasts? What would be the best way to capture key presses and their results in vim? Any recommendations? Since it's basically about text and key presses, I'd assume that one would choose slightly different tools than for more graphically oriented UIs.

I've used keycastr in the past (OS X) for showing the keys I'm pressing. It's a little distracting though.

I've found that with sufficient narration, I don't need it.

On linux there's screenkey :

http://pabloseminario.com/projects/screenkey/

r00k, thanks and keep them coming. The tagline at the top "Detailed Vim content...." seems to target the site at more experienced users, whereas most of your content (so far) is focused on the first-week vim user.

Well, detailed doesn't necessarily mean advanced :), but I'm planning on releasing advanced content too.

That confused me as well.

i see the URL for the posts contains "sample". Is the author intending on charging for content?

Yep, I plan on having a mix of free and paid content.

This is amazing, thank you very much. I look forward to beingg done with nano and notepad++!

Lets do it for Notepad and TextEdit, too!

I think in this special case, it's much faster to google and read instead of watching a relatively long video.

For example searching how to save a Vim-macro yields this very useful result: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Macros

I agree that watching videos is a pain sometimes when you want specific information.

On the other hand, watching a person do the task can be a nice "breakthrough" from the eyes of a noob.

For example, I've watched some https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/ videos. I could have read an article that says the same things, but you get a nice context for the reasoning. You see the thing happen. It's nice for the programming perspective, perhaps not for looking up certain macros.

Watching Derek Wyatt's screencast was very motivating when I switched from TextMate but I don't think I've learned much from his videos. Everything goes too fast, you can't really move around the video in an intuitive manner and the guy is too distractingly funny.

Forcing myself to use Vim everyday for everything for a few weeks (and all the vim-related googling that ensued) sure helped me a lot more than these screencasts.

But again, those are very exciting and it sure helps to stay excited when you have a mountain to climb.

What about beginners that don't know that VIM has certain features?

A similar topic - where there's a feature you don't even realise you could take huge benefit from. The first time I was shown '.' for redo I thought "why would I want to use that?"

r00k as someone who really like vim and use it daily, I have to say I have fairly negative impression of your effort here. I wish you well as fellow vim user.

Can you explain why you have that impression?

This obsession with text editing efficiency is getting out of hand.

Ok...I took the bait! This might be true! I run Linux therefore most configuration is done with a text editor. I suppose if you are not a developer and don't run *nix you might not see the importance of effeciency while text editing.

I guess there are many worse things to be obsessed with :-)

On the other hand, I feel so slow and inefficient when I use a text entry box that DOESN'T have vim bindings.

If that's the case then I am happy about it. There's been a big push lately about editors and it swayed me to finally use VIM... and I love it! I am a lot more productive since the change. I appreciate all the content people are putting out there for VIM. I learn something new every day.

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