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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Sort of let's me wonder, why anybody would want to learn all those. I use vim regularly, but to be honest, for 90% of tasks i would be just as efficient with pico or mcedit.

I guess i am using vim only because it is most often available on 3rd party systems and because of the occasional need for those last 10%.

And to be honest, i used to use vim on the desktop for some time, but now we have this variety of options.. from fast loading textadept, gedit, sublime text3 to full-blown IntelliJ.. Why vim? Because it's "cool"? Feels more like ancient and antiquated.

Nice list though, it's bookmarked for those 10%! :)

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Hardly anybody would want to learn all of the features ofcourse. There are advantages of using vim which other editors can't compete with (imho):

- A just booted VM with with no window manager installed. You have very few choices, but can always count on vi being there.

- Abstraction: One builds up the knowledge of different things over a period of time. For exaxmple, once you learn 'w' is next word, it can be combined with the new knowledge of 'd' for delete quite intuitively. Not saying other editors don't have that.

- Each popular editor I know of has a VI mode built in (or easily available). So, being comfortable with vi means being able to use any of the mainstream editors with vi mode, but not the other way around.

It's useful to see how others apply vim's grammar in interesting ways. To me, it's like seeing a new design pattern. Not necessarily immediately useful, but a maybe a new way to think about something I may not already know.

I didn't question the usefulness, i still often use vim and i am regularly amazed by it. But still.

That's the way I approach some lists like this one. Specific examples can help one to in turn better learn and generalize certain abilities/behaviours.

I'll also add: So, one person puts up a long-ish page of examples. Is there anything inherently wrong with this? Presumably, it's useful to them and perhaps to some others. Doesn't that suffice -- it's the Internet!

Not every page needs to be carefully curated for global karma-whoring.

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