Friday, September 2, 2011

Re: O-Reilly's Learning the vi and Vim Editors

On Sep 1, 2011, at 8:15 PM, Hozzy2u wrote:

> 63 and a complete noobe to Vim, I've installed version 7.3 in Windows
> Vista. I'm trying to find an extra income source and settled on
> formatting plain text files into e-books using xhtml. I found what
> appears to be a phenomenal program, Vim but it looks to be more than a
> little intimidating. I'm familiar with the publisher of the book
> referred to in the subject line but am concerned with the fact that it
> appears much of the book deals with vi. Is the material on vi of any
> value in learning Vim? Money is a little short lately and I don't wish
> to waste any. Thanks to anyone kind enough to answer this.

I'm older than you, and a not-quite complete noobie, but definitely a noobie compared to most here. I can't speak about the O'Reilly book, except that I've thought of buying, but only thought of. I did buy the Oualinne book, which is touted here, or at least on vim.org, and found it distinctly unhelpful.

That said, my advice would be to just start. Use this list. People are more than generous. And almost always, it seems, there is a ready solution. Not quite, but almost. By asking questions here I was able to get Vim set up so that it was comfortable to me. It probably helps that I'm an OS X user and I use the MacVim version of Vim.

Vim is powerful. More powerful than I even understand. There re tons of neat plugins that extend its capabilities in interesting ways. I frequently hear people here who are way more competent than me saying they're "still learning." That's one of the cool things about Vim -- that it can be used at many different levels of expertise.

Just start. You'll get comfortable with it quicker than you imagine. Especially if you're any kind of programmer, though that is not necessary.

Regards,
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Weir
eeweir@bellsouth.net

"Human coexistence and social life constitute the good common to us all
from which and thanks to which all cultural and social goods derive." - Zygmunt Bauman

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