I'm a bit ashamed to ask, but .. as someone that is using vim quite a bit (but certainly no expert), I didn't recognize any of those.
Can you elaborate and explain what you're missing and what for?
Can you elaborate and explain what you're missing and what for?
Once you get used to using them, you will only use / or : when the search or command you want is absolutely simple and straightforward.
:normal lets you use normal commands at a command line, often used for automation or scripting stuff... so you can do :normal 5j to go down 5 lines.
C-n is just normal complete
Practical Vim the book is a good place to start. You should be spending as much time learning Vim as using Vim for about the first two years of your Vim usage.
- you haven't answered my question. Like, at all.
- I don't quite like the 'would be better off in an IDE' part.
That said, at this point I'll better see what I can find about these oh-so-essential features and I might even add them to my routine/workflow (so far, I still don't know why though...).
Edit: As expected, the help page doesn't explain why I should care about those. q: and q/ are nothing I ever missed, :normal is weird and I cannot imagine what it is used for. Basically my whole reason to jump on this thread "Okay, now I don't know these. Why are they useful?" is absolutely still relevant. Reading the documentation isn't enough. I .. won't buy a book at this point.
In fact, I think I only type `q:` as a typo when I'm trying to `:q[uit]` :p