[fallintothis]

ci" deletes the inside of parentheses

I think you mean inside quotes, by the way.

I find the idea that there are 100 vim commands every programmer should know a but ludicrous though.

Especially considering that the "100" commands were all compositions of simpler vim commands anyways. I don't think this is actually that great a submission, for this reason. How many ways are there to rehash some really specific example -- say, counting both ":set syntax [on|off]"? Vim is so much more general than that. It seems inaccurate -- even discourteous -- to treat this as some laundry list of commands in your bag of tricks (except in the case of, say, muscle memory). From my experience, you don't memorize some long string of letters as a command; you think of what each tiny bit does in and of itself, then compose that into whatever you want to accomplish. Rather than commit the string "ggguG" to your brain, vim users think of it as "go to the beginning of the file (gg), then uppercase (gu) to the end of the the file (G)". Granted, vim gets more complicated as you delve into the realm of motions, .vimrc level configurations, ex command line, etc.

Also, it seems that vim users would be the real ones who need to know such things, not every programmer altogether. The title feels cheap / sensationalized that way.

If there were some REAL list of vim commands "every programmer should know" (well, vim-user), I'd at least start by recommending the alphabet...

[joshuaxls]

I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much everything you've said here. There is no magic "Vim cheat sheet" for new Vim users. To understand the power of Vim, you have to understand the power of its parts. It reminds me of playing with K'NEX as a kid: you either learn how to build magnificent things by learning how pieces combine to form powerful designs, or you blindly follow the built-in diagrams for prefabricated creations (not really understanding how they came to be) and then dump it a few days later out of boredom.

That said, I up-voted this submission solely because it's showing off Vim. That's what I try to do with the programmers I meet -- evangelize about Vim.

I'll never forget the first time I saw an ancient Vim user hacking away at code. It seriously blew me away, and I knew that I had to learn it. Via a combination of :help and O'Reilly's "Learning the Vi Editor", I learned. Four years later (and that's young for a Vim user), I'll never look back.

Point being: you can't learn via a cheat sheet. Dive into Vim, starting from the basics.

[palish]

Well, I found the list to be very useful. I did not know about "/jo[ha]n", for example.

[BrandonM]

That's basic regular expression syntax. Learning that will go a long way in helping you learn a lot of tools in Unix, including grep, sed, vim, emacs, perl (which generally has a slightly different syntax, but one that matches in this case), bash programming in general, and more.