[merijnv]

It took me a day to use it as "notepad with syntax highlighting", couple of weeks before I started preferring normal mode to insert mode, and from there on I slowly evolved my configuration and the tricks I use/learn.

Nowadays when using vim I occasionally have people ask me "how did you do that?" and I won't even know what keys I typed. The keybindings are as natural as walking/grabbing things and require as much conscious thoughts. I usually have to redo it in slow motion to see what I did...

I can highly recommend Bram Moolenaar's essay on "The Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing" (http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html), it has a vim focus, but I think his points are editor agnostic

Edit: I started using vim as a windows GUI person in university since I wanted to edit over SSH and vim was the only editor with syntax highlighting on the servers. So it's not like I was a terminal wizard back then (I am now :p)