Can you elaborate and explain what you're missing and what for?
Once you get used to using them, you will only use / or : when the search or command you want is absolutely simple and straightforward.
:normal lets you use normal commands at a command line, often used for automation or scripting stuff... so you can do :normal 5j to go down 5 lines.
C-n is just normal complete
Practical Vim the book is a good place to start. You should be spending as much time learning Vim as using Vim for about the first two years of your Vim usage.
- you haven't answered my question. Like, at all.
- I don't quite like the 'would be better off in an IDE' part.
That said, at this point I'll better see what I can find about these oh-so-essential features and I might even add them to my routine/workflow (so far, I still don't know why though...).
Edit: As expected, the help page doesn't explain why I should care about those. q: and q/ are nothing I ever missed, :normal is weird and I cannot imagine what it is used for. Basically my whole reason to jump on this thread "Okay, now I don't know these. Why are they useful?" is absolutely still relevant. Reading the documentation isn't enough. I .. won't buy a book at this point.
q/
q:
:normal
ctrl-n in insert mode (or any completion like ctrl-x ctrl-l) of course plenty of command line options like virtualedit:
Though it does implement the expression register ( i CTRL-R = ), the regex class \x (among Vim's other rando regex classes), and :set synmaxcol which is pretty nitty gritty.