It's not a different tutorial. It's a gigantic, messy, incomplete reference card. And yes, it is predatory, just like every other ebook/app/whatever based on the misconception that Vim is hard to learn.
I've been using Vim as my full time editor for a decade (well Neovim for the last five years), so believe me when I say this: Vim is hard to learn. It's not a misconception. Modal editing never really took off, so people's exposure to text editing prior to learning Vim is generally something like MSOffice, which is not modal.
Maybe you're some hypergenius who picked up Vim in an afternoon, but I know several people who I recommended "just go through Vimtutor" and it didn't stick for them.
12 years, here, 10 of them spent debunking such nonsense and reverting all the silly misconceptions people get from tweets/videos/posts/etc. Vim is _not_ hard to learn. It's more than a misconception, at this point, it's a myth. The learning material is free, easy to follow, and goes very progressively from nothing to advanced without even assuming computer proficiency. The only requirements are a) Vim, b) high school level ESL, c) time.
> Modal editing never really took off, so people's exposure to text editing prior to learning Vim is generally something like MSOffice, which is not modal.
Well, modal editing is just some $NEW_THING you must learn to do $ACTIVITY efficiently. Just like a new framework or ice skating. Not having been exposed to it prior to your first time is not a handicap because no one has. Every budding vimmer is literally equal before modal editing.
> Maybe you're some hypergenius who picked up Vim in an afternoon
It took me 4 months to know enough of Vim and be comfortable enough to ditch my previous editor for good.
> but I know several people who I recommended "just go through Vimtutor" and it didn't stick for them.
Well, that's a dumb advice so no surprise, here: you rigged them for failure and they failed. vimtutor only covers the basics needed for adding a line to /etc/hosts or write a commit message so no wonder why they bailed out if they believed they were going to be wizards after a 30 minutes tutorial. The real learning starts at :help user-manual.
Besides, giving up after vimtutor is perfectly OK. Vim is just one editor among many and it is not for everyone.
Learning Vim is _not_ hard. What _is_ hard is using it efficiently without learning it, which makes people take all kinds of silly shortcuts and spread all kinds of silly ideas.
you have a very weird mix of arrogance and blinders going on here. looking back through the thread, your one consistent argument is people are being 'duped' thinking they'll be 'wizards' by all these earnest, helpful tutorials... and that vim is __not__ hard to learn.
It's simply not the case. Maybe it was the case for you. Maybe you purchased a vim book and didn't become this mythical hacker wizard. maybe vim seems absurdly simple to you because you are a genius. I don't know!
But I do know this - other people have different contexts, different knowledge, different experiences than you do. When you stomp around angrily and arrogantly denouncing a perfectly innocent thing like a vim tutorial, and show zero indication that you understand that other people find things valuable when you cannot see that value... it just makes you look like a fool.
I'd put my money on the notion that very few, if any readers of HN are going to be impressed by your furious denouncement here - rather they are only going to see a weak fool shaking his tiny fists at a perceived slight for no special reason. Maybe they'll chuckle. Put me down for $20 on that action.
> It took me 4 months to know enough of Vim and be comfortable enough to ditch my previous editor for good.
OK, but you can be productive with Eclipse or Jetbrains (or even Emacs) in an afternoon. This implies to me that they're easier.
For me, it also took a few months to get to the point where I felt comfortable getting rid of Emacs and use Vim for everything, but it only took me a few days to be productive with Emacs initially. The swap was worth it, but it was a steep learning curve.
Eclipse and friends are more approachable than Vim because they all follow the same familiar model. With so much of the core in common, newcomers and switchers have very little to learn to use those tools efficiently.
Vim being a modal editor, it is very unfamiliar to newcomers and switchers so they have a lot more to learn to use it efficiently.
But "little to learn" doesn't necessarily mean "easy to learn" and "a lot to learn" doesn't necessarily mean "hard to learn". In practice, "little to learn" means "easy to pick up" and "a lot to learn" means "hard to pick up", which is something else entirely. Eclipse, IntelliJ, VS Code, etc. are definitely easier to pick up than Vim but that doesn't make Vim "hard to learn" at all. It just means that, if you want to get something done quickly or don't want to invest too much effort into it, Vim might not be the most appropriate tool in the toolbox.
Take Sublime Text, for example. It followed a familiar editing model but its documentation was so lacking that members of the community had to put up an alternative doc. ST was (I have no idea how it fares today) definitely "easy to pick up" but also "hard to learn", all because of poor documentation.
Obviously, the modes, the wonky ways to copy and paste, etc. have always made Vim "hard to pick up". But with vimtutor as a first step and the very well written and progressive user manual as a second step, it _actually_ is "easy to learn". There is literally no obstacle beside one's own laziness or lack of focus or something external out of one's control. You _really_ move from super basic stuff, to less basic stuff, to cool stuff, to mind-blowing stuff in the most gentle, step-by-step way. The user manual is awesome.
In short, Vim is easy to learn and it has a very smooth learning curve.
The things people have trouble with are:
- the off-putting unfamiliarity of the first contact,
- the lack of menus and things that would make it easier to pick up,
- the unfounded expectations, reinforced by social media bullshit,
- the unfounded fears, reinforced by social media bullshit,
- the perceived need to be productive right now,
- a general taste for battery-included things,
- a general confusion between "learning about something" and "learning something",
- a general aversion for learning and, mostly, being taught,
- and for reading,
- the false impression of being smart enough to get it without learning,
- a goal-oriented approach that seems to justify every fucking shortcut ("I'm a React Dev, give me a config, plz."),
One reason I chose Vim is because I was tired of reaching the limitations in various editors I've tried and I wanted one I wouldn't outgrow.
It's been about 10 years and I'm still learning new things, even though I've had the basics down for quite a while. There have been times I've gone down some deep Vim rabbit holes for a particular project; it's great knowing all of the power is there any time you need it.
