The Vim Beginners’ Site
vim.begin-site.org
vim.begin-site.org
After mastering it, I recommend hanging out on #vim on freenode. You'll get a great education just from reading the questions/answers others have. And any time you find yourself doing something complex in vim multiple times, ask about it on #vim and you'll probably get some suggestions on how to do it more efficiently.
Another thing that helps is reading the documentation for every option you put in your ~/.vimrc, and trying to fully understand what's happening there and why. And try to avoid blindly using other people's .vimrc's. Instead, use their .vimrc's for inspiration, transferring over only those parts you understand and find useful.
And yes to the ~/.vimrc advice here. You should start with an empty dotfile and build up from there. DO NOT make the mistake of starting out by installing Janus. There shouldn't be anything in your ~/.vimrc until you understand what it does, and editing that file should be done incrementally by the user instead of being a copied file. This is part of the learning process.
> VimGolf - “Real Vim ninjas count every keystroeke — do you?”
Obviously the writer isn't a ninja.
15 minutes later after learning commands like A, I, o, O, dd, p, and P it was clear to me that I wanted to use Vim seriously.
The hard part was arriving at a workflow, a set of plugins that I actually liked using. I imagine a great deal of people don't get to that point. I almost didn't. Especially since the commonly recommended plugins like NERDTree are awkward and clunky.
I think discovering CtrlP was the turning point for me.
A lot of luck was definitely involved. Sometimes I stay up at night wondering just how many versions of myself had given up on Vim when my wavefunction collapsed and I happened to be the chosen eigenstate that stuck with it.
As far as "actually productive," having a better editing/writing flow is one of the biggest productivity enhancements I've encountered in my programming career.
The parent's site offers nothing productive, in fact I think it causes more confusion with it's terrible UI, terrible content and erratic layout. I feel bad for being so critical, but resources like this are why learning vim was so hard in the first place. Why, when I click on the gigantic "Learn Vim Now" text, am I not directed to some actual learning resources?
> It is not a guide to using Vim. Before reading this book you should be comfortable editing text in Vim
I think a site like the OP (even if it is shitty) is aimed more at the "I know what vim is, maybe I did visudo once and cried a bunch, but I have never touched it" crowd.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily defending Vim here. The learning curve is steep, but the "evidence" you're providing here only illustrates that you can't spot differences in basic nouns (Vim versus Vimscript). This is a challenge that any reasonably skilled problem solver would have resolved with one Google query and 5 minutes of reading.