Re: OT: The so called "steep learning curve" of vim...

On 2 October 2012 03:25, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> The fact is, that for X amount of time,
> the Vim newbie will be helpless with Vim. That's not true of Notepad or
> GEdit.

How is that a fact? If one only does in Vim the kind of "editing"
that they do in Notepad (e.g. when using Vim in easy mode), would
they even notice a difference?

> There's going to be a certain amount of time
> during which a brand new Vim user is completely nonproductive in Vim,
> because all he's doing is learning, not using.

To say that Vim, as a particular text editor, has a steep learning
curve, would mean that there are other editors that let their users
do similar things but require no or little learning. What are those
editors?

I strongly suspect that what is being perceived as "Vim's steepness"
is in fact the difficulty of learning to edit text efficaciously and
efficiently. That difficulty is not somehow specific to Vim alone,
but is essential to the task it solves. I'll agree that Vim has a
steep learning curve when I'm shown a text editor with similar
capabilities and a 'gradual' learning curve. Until then, I consider
it a myth, and one that is harmful to Vim's popularity.

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