The beauty of Vim is that it uses almost a natural-language approach to editing. It's not the opposite of user friendly, it is, in fact, much closer to the user's consciousness, than many other editing paradigms. I.e. when I am editing text in vim I am translating my intentions to vim commands almost directly. "Change this paragraph" becomes "cip", or "cap" as in change inside/around paragraph. Select text up (or down) to line 30 is v30G. This one does not translate to proper English directly, but it's pretty straitforward when you know how to build Vim's "phrases".