Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

Re:Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003) by gen220 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @02:20PM (#23094503)

I agree. You need to use vimtutor to get the basics: the simplest modes (insert, normal), the simplest normal-mode motions (hjkl), the simplest normal-mode actions (d, c, f/t), and the concept of "adverbs" (8j, 4dw, 2df]).

Once you have mastered these simple concepts, most of the magic comes from (1) combining them (2) googling the things that you intuitively know must be possible, and discovering how they're done, which in turn gives you more basic concepts.

At that point, your feedback loop gives you escape velocity, and you'll never willingly go back to a standard text editor again. :)

Getting escape velocity is really tough, though.

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Re:Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003) by derekp7 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @09:01PM (#23098452)

For me, learning came when I was on an IBM RT/PC (pre RS-6000), in something like 90 or 91. I used IBM's editor from the console, but one time I had to edit something from a terminal back in the shop. Which didn't have full support for the IBM editor (Ined I think it was called), due to the way the keyboard was mapped. Something about left cursor was the same as backspace (ctrl-h).

Well, that did it -- I went back to my desk, and pulled up vi-tutor.txt, then never looked back.

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