Re: Any non-programmer users of Vim here?

On 04/08/2011 09:51 AM, Eric Weir wrote:
> On Apr 7, 2011, at 10:20 PM, Tim Chase wrote:
>> http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/1999/unix_editor.html
>
> Thanks, Tim. The note on this link recommends O'Reilly's book
> on Vi and when you go to the O'Reilly pages linked in it their
> are rave comments about the book.

A slightly biased link, as the "Ask Tim" column is asking Tim
O'Reilly, for whom O'Reilly is named. :)

> Is this the book for a totally new *Vim* user of my background
> with the use I've indicated? Doesn't O'Reilly have a book
> directly on Vim?

O'Reilly has both "Learning Vi and Vim" and "Vi and Vim Editors
Pocket Reference". Additionally, New Riders put out Steve
Oualline's "Vi IMproved" though it's dated 2001 which doesn't
touch newer advances in Vim. While I've skimmed all 3 titles,
I'd say it depends on how you learn. I threw myself into
learning Vim, restricting myself to Vim for all my text-editing.
I achieved functional parity to my old editors' level of
comfort (QEdit and the Turbo Pascal IDE for DOS, various IDE's in
Win32, and Nano/Pico on *nix) within 2-3 weeks. And after a
month, the productivity gains from using Vim blew away the other
editors so it's hard to go back.

The biggest skill to have when learning Vim is to reflect on what
your doing to the point where you see yourself repeating certain
actions and then asking (yourself, the help, the mailing list, a
book, a Vim wiki, etc.) how you can improve. I find that just
asking questions here on the list (and lurking to see other folks
asking/answering questions) advanced me farther than any book
would have.

And lastly, I'll plug vimgolf.com if you want to stretch yourself. :)

-tim

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