> 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode.

Right, there is mental overhead to calculate moves but often times you can extract out patterns into intuitive key mappings once you've solved the problem once.

For example, this is taken my vimrc:

    nnoremap <silent> s* :let @/='\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>'<CR>cgn
    xnoremap <silent> s* "sy:let @/=@s<CR>cgn

The basic idea here is I can either move the cursor on top of a word or select some text, hit s*, type what I want to change that text to and then hit dot (.) as many times as I want to repeat the change to the next match. It's like being able to use multiple cursors except without needing multiple cursors and I also get to see the result applied once before I start applying it to multiple things. It's also possible to skip matches using existing Vim mappings (n).

I use the above all the time to make changes in spots where I would have used multiple cursors with VSCode.

You prove my point. You had to create this insane macro to solve something that cmd-d does automatically in VSCode. And cmd-d is much more versatile, since the same concept applies to many other use cases.

And sorry I say insane, but not knowing the language, your macro looks absolutely absurd and as obscure as a sample of brainf*ck.

I refuse to learn such a complicated language just to create a macro that replaces cmd-d and cmd-z, just so I can brag that I use Vim.

Clever! I think I might steal these, or make something based on your idea.

Kind of wild: in taking apart your command, I learned three things about Vim that I didn’t know, each one of which is massively useful. And I use it every day!

> I think I might steal these, or make something based on your idea.

Sure thing, if you can improve it let me know.

Here's an even wilder thing. I set those s* mappings up about 2 weeks after using Vim and I still don't know how they work in perfect detail but I was able to find them by Googling. There's definitely a stigma that you need to be some crazy wizard to use Vim but with a bit of repetitive learning and Google you can get pretty far.

Here's a link to my vimrc around a few mappings associated to finding / replacing and multi-cursor-like things: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/085c4ac827290bc7aeea...