Ask HN: Have you learned / tried to learn Vim? How did you approach it?
First, your question.<p>I was on the market for a TextMate replacement that worked both on Mac OS X (at work) and Linux (at home) so I searched far and wide and came up with a list of editors and IDEs, GUI and TUI. I approached all of them with the same strategy:<p>1. follow the introductory tutorials, if any,<p>2. if the first contact was promising, use it for a while, learning and configuring as I go,<p>3. move to the next editor&#x2F;IDE in the list.<p>For some, I gave up after half an hour, for others it went on for a few weeks, but I wanted to give all of them a fair chance so I eventually ended up at the bottom of the list, with Vim and its weirdo reputation.<p>So I did `$ vimtutor` and I was instantly hooked. As instructed, I graduated to the user manual which I stupidly rushed only to fall into the blogosphere trap and its many &quot;here is my setup&quot; posts. The winner was clear at that point and, after wasting a couple months trying to shoehorn my TextMate workflow, I finally decided to throw my `.vim` through the window and learn Vim properly this time, with the user manual.<p>Two months after that I was finally able to replace TextMate with Vim and I have never looked back.<p>Second, thoughts on learning Vim.<p>- Random online snippets, quick tips and tricks, tweets, etc. are useless because they lack context. They are also wrong very often.<p>- Using it right away for work is a bad idea because it forces you to copy other people&#x27;s config and install lots of plugins that hide Vim and ultimately prevent you from learning it properly.<p>- Learning&#x2F;using Vim has nothing to do with muscle memory. This is a common misconception that leads to rote learning and, since Vim has hundreds of commands, the use of flawed ready-made cheatsheets _and_ the looking for ways to bypass that horrifying learning curve.<p>- A flight simulator is not a plane and a tool-for-learning-vim-that-is-not-vim is not Vim. There are very good reasons for doing part of one&#x27;s learning on a flight simulator but learning Vim in Vim is as free and safe as it gets so there is no point learning it via a third party tool.<p>Third, thoughts on your project.<p>There is no _need_ for anything else than `$ vimtutor` and `:help user-manual`.