Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Re: new vim user

Xen wrote,
>> 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".

I also used to have problems with those, until I realized that
they have or can be thought to have mnemonic names, which may not
be obvious if English isn't your native language:

Key Mnemonic

|b| |b|eginning of this word
|B| |B|eginning of a bigger chunk -- B is a big b!
|e| |e|nd of this word
|E| |E|nd of a bigger chunk
|w| |w|hitespace after word included
|W| |W|hitespace after bigger chunk included

The w and W mnemonics *are* a bit contrieved, but the included
whitespace is the important difference from e and E, and once I
came up with them the served me well -- I almost never used w or
W before that! Now of course I hardly need them anymore.

Ethan Hereth wrote:
> As far as becoming proficient with Vim, I found that for me the
> best way was to find a couple/few good Vim cheat sheets and
> keep them by the computer to reference when I couldn't quite
> remember how to best complete the task at hand, until I no
> longer had to look at them.

I would also encourage everyone to write their own cheat sheet
with the things they use/need often, and revising it, removing
things from the cheat sheet as you memorize them, and adding
new things which seem useful as you discover them in the help
or online.

Of course one should browse around in the :help, which is great
*if you know where to look*. Unfortunately in my experience
that is far from always the case. I wonder how that could be
improved?

Then there is of course Google

"vim phrase describing what it is I want to do"

Remember: the more specific your query the more specific your
answers. Use normal English describing what you are looking
for, rather than trying to come up with a few keywords -- i.e.
express your needs as is most natural to the brain. Google
knows how to make the most out of it. I actually find things in
the online vimdoc with google more easily than I find them
with :help...

/bpj

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