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by valunord 621 days ago
I once set out to learn Vi, but the absurd modal editing and convoluted key combinations for basic tasks made it a nightmare. Efficient and logical, my ass!
2 comments

I find it hard to believe you encountered a single key combination when starting to use vi. Maybe you got far enough to see "ctrl-v"? There are 108 unmodified choices before you'd ever need a combination.
: is shifted on almost every keyboard layout, so saving or quitting would require at least one key combination (OK, arguably you can quit with caps lock, Z, Z, caps lock).

But I suspect he meant "sequence of keys" by "key combination" in what was clearly intended to be a humorous parody of the previous comment.

I always remap : (colon) to ; (semicolon) in vi clones to avoid having to use the shift key.
Furiously spamming ctrl-c trying to quit ?

ctrl-f and ctrl-b are the one I use frequently and amongst the first ones I learned.

I also like Ctrl-o and Ctrl-i for fast-travel between positions (even across files), and especially that they make sense with an out/in mnemonic.
FWIW, my editor of choice is Kate (with LSP plugin!)

I have more respect for vi's key bindings though because they are, in fact, quite efficient. But I only know enough vi for basic editing.