Hi,
It's not like I'm really all that new to VIM but I can't say I've ever used it in a decent way.
Much of what I know is just muscle memory from a past life.
The way you use some long deceased piece of software (or a game) and still remember all the shortcuts.
But I've never known even how to use multiple windows or several buffers in the same window. I'm using it through Putty on some Debian shell server.
It's been my Linux editor of choice since forever, but that was mostly because there was nothing that came even remotely close. I've never fancied anything like Emacs and the only other alternative seems to have been Pico/Nano/Joe.
Some of VIM is the fact that I've never read much help documentation, the other part is that even if I know the buttons, I still mess up regulary. I mean I regularly execute commands by accident and I don't even know what commands they are and suddenly parts of text are gone or pasted. And sometimes I seem to accidentily undo a host of changes and I don't know how to redo them.
But the reason I'm here today is that I've started writing some PHP software on that shell server and my old VIM style is becoming a bit too limited even for me :p.
Mouse-based copy & paste through Putty has its limitations and I wasn't even able to disable the auto-indent last time I tried. So right now I only use it for singe lines (no \n) but it's still not exactly anywhere near my editing 'skills' back when I was using Borland's Turbo Pascal editor in DOS.
A lot of the difficulty of VIM is also that some commands require too much brain processing power for me. Examples are the b,B,w,W commands that are so unintuitive to me that I mess them up every time I use them to navigate, except as part of "cw", "dw", "cW" and "dW". On Windows I would use ctrl-right and ctrl-left to quicly traverse lines of text, but on VIM I use the arrow keys only. Or, when I'm in a hurry I will scan the text that I want to end up at and do a / search for that text. But that itself is too much brain effort.
Brain effort is also the reason I so greatly dislike the Windows 7 changes to (config) navigation. They want you to always enter search queries. Ubuntu also has something like that now that they call the Dash or something. The problem with these things is not only that you have to think about what you want to search (instead of mindlessly finding the right spot by part muscle memory and part stupidity) but also that these search fields are slow to respond and they interrupt your flow of activity when you just want to keep going.
One of the best things about VIM is that your typing speed is basically the only bottleneck in what you can achieve. Many commands do not require any ctrl-key combinations and I don't know about other people's hands, but shift-key has always been much faster for me than ctrl-key.
I also have no idea how to input special characters like Latin characters. If I enter them they issue strange commands in VIM that I don't want or know about. Perhaps in editing source material it's better not to use any character set like UTF8 but rather write things like Ōsaka, but how useful that is for other things is beyond me.
The whole benefit of VIM is that you don't need any brainpower for the commands you have memorized into muscle memory. It's fast, uninhibited workflow. You can be like a real code hacker in VIM :p.
Like one of those people who actually do stuff. That's actually meant to do something :p.
Anyway, if you have any tips or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
I started looking into VIM more because I had started writing some documentation for my code and I realized there was no color syntax highlighting. And then I didn't get that to work, and in the end it turned out my .vimrc must have had a hardcoded runtime path pointing to vim63 or something similar, instead of the current version of 73 that is installed. I have no idea if it did, because I overwrote it with someone else's .vimrc that ALSO pointed to a vim63 folder and which bricked the loading of all syntax files :((.
Anyway, now my colors work. I'm using koehler and it is decent, I just need to change the color of commented text (too bright) and of quoted text (too colorful). Also, it seems to use a different color for known PHP functions as for unknown PHP functions. The benefit of this is too much for simple minds such as myself to understand, and it doesn't even cover all functions (like convert_uuencode() was left out).
It's time for some happy coding :).
Regards, Xen.
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