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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I've been using vim for over 20 years as my primary editor. I'm faster and more comfortable in it than I am in any other editor, but I still feel like a vim noob

I still have to look up how to do things I rarely do (like insert the contents of another file at the cursor position). And I don't really use many (if any) of vim's intermediate features, let alone advanced ones.

I've tried various ways to get more fluent, but nothing really stuck or kept my interest. This has always annoyed me a bit...

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I've been using vim for 20 years as well, for everything other than Java code. I type my .vimrc by hand on each new machine to set a half dozen options.

Of the intermediate features, I use tabs and, more recently, split windows.

My favorite 'advanced' feature is visual block selection and replacement over multiple lines - super convenient.

Same here. I use vim over other editors / key schemas mostly because it's easier for me than pressing a whole bunch of keys simultaneously. I use it where I can in other apps too. That's also why I only use a relatively small subset (whatever they all implement) and never spent too much time into going totally overboard with learning all its capabilities.

Also, typing just isn't really that much of task in the first place. I spend way more time trying to find out what to do and how, and then finally typing it isn't as relevant that I would need to optimize it over a certain point.

My time with Vi/Vim is similar, measured in decades.

There's a lot in Vim, and there's no requirement to be a tech maximalist. Settling at core features is not being a noob.

I think vim's greatest problem is discoverability. It's a big enough problem that after six or so months working full time in neovim I went back to a GUI editor. I just about barely remember the most common commands, but I do not remember (at all) anything I only need occasionally. I also know myself well enough to know I will never remember this sort of thing well. I have a terrible memory for procedural / administrative / ritualistic knowledge.

I'm on Sublime right now. I like it a lot less than vim, but it's far less cryptic. If I need to tile four documents and move text around, I can do so trivially by dragging, without needing a PhD in vim esoterica that I would immediately forget the next day.

I 100% agree, but I also think you can get very far with just taking a weekend to read the user manual (:h user-manual). It won't solve the remembering problem, but it will make looking up help when you need it much easier. For example, you would know that most window operations start with <C-w>, so when you need to tile windows you could start with looking up `:h ctrl_w`.

There is also a very popular plugin for neovim that shows a popup with possible keybinds and descriptions whenever you begin any keybind: https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

This is all great advice and I appreciate it.

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