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by bee_rider 1207 days ago
I’m definitely not going to try and endorse intentional incompetence.

I think it is just not so tricky in the first place. If you start out with “you can use hjkl for directions, and y for copy, d for delete, these can be combined with directions and prepended with numbers; remember the modes, and :w and :q” vim is already as good as most others editors. Then I’d just start using it, rather than trying to learn from the top.

My filter for when I should learn a new feature is when it solves a task I find repetitive and annoying (or I will make a post on Hackernews that says learning Vim is useless, to get a list of features that people actually use day to day). Since we all have different idiosyncrasies, this filter will be different from person to person, so I don’t really get the idea of a guide.

That said, I’m just describing what worked for me; if someone wants a guide they should go for it, we all learn differently after all.

1 comments

> My filter for when I should learn a new feature is when it solves a task I find repetitive and annoying

There! You said it so well... that's the #0 reason why I go RTFM'ing, because most likely my problem fits a pattern someone already encountered and figured a solution for. Or nobody did and I put together a less annoying workflow to deal with it.

Sometimes the effort is worth it, but often it is just fun trying out new things/techniques.