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Comment by Puer | Hacker News Reader

I switched from nano to vim a few hours ago. When I first installed Arch Linux all those months ago I was intimidated when I was presented with the choice between nano, the default, and vim, "for experts only." When I used vim for the first time today I expected it to be a lot more "difficult" based on everything I had read/heard prior, but after reaching the Arch Wiki entry I was able to hop right in with no difficulties at all. Honestly, the biggest "challenge" I'm facing so far is just getting used to typing "vim" when my brain is used to typing "nano." I'm not denying that vim is complex, and it will probably take me months to "master" it and use it to its full potential, but it isn't hard to just jump into and use, and like you mentioned vanilla vim works perfectly fine.

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Just out of curiosity, what made you decide to change? I've never felt a strong motivation to not just keep using pico/nano, actually putting effort into learning a text editor strikes me as the weirdest hobby ever.

I used to use nano, and for me it was the fact that every one else seemed to love vim, so I felt like I should at least try it out. Honestly, it takes about 20 minutes, max, to get to the level of being able to do what nano can do in vim. And if you want something more, it's not very hard to learn after you get the vim basics. I'm not going to say it's for everyone (especially if you're already used to a full IDE) but I would encourage anyone who's at least a little interested in trying it out for a day.

One time I started editing an nginx.conf file in nano while setting up a remote server on Linode. I forgot to sudo when I opened the file and couldn't save my changes. I might be an idiot here but (could I have resolved this in nano?)... but I'm fairly certain this would have been a non-issue in Vim.

One simple solution that people often forget - at least I know I did in this situation is to save the file in home directory and then move it using su(do).

  " Use w!! to sudo save after file is already opened
  cmap w!! w !sudo tee % >/dev/null

See Nathan Long's awesome answer for an explanation: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2600783/how-does-the-vim-...

It isn't a hobby, it's a one-off investment. Surely anyone who programs learns a new thing every now and then?

It just happened to be a good time to switch, to be honest. I've migrated from Openbox to Awesome WM in the past few days, and I needed a good editor with features like syntax highlighting, line numbers and great community themes as I learned my way around rc.lua. Also, as mentioned previously, Vim has a "reputation" for being difficult to master. It interested me, and all of the Linux gurus I know seem to use it, so I figured I would give it a shot.

Once you learn to jump quickly between words, lines, etc. and change whole blocks of text with a few strokes you discover another dimension of vim that's very hard to replace with other tools.

If you learn how to do the same things in emacs, about 90% of it carries over to the native text widgets in OS X and Linux.

No.

C-a and C-e and a dozen of others are there, yes, but good luck if you think you can use M-%, M-h or whatever is the Emacs equivalent of Vim's text-objects and motions (which is what the parent was thinking about).

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