Don't be intimidated. Vim can be used like a simple DOS-era editor without unusual difficulty, and you can learn the more advanced facilities at your own pace. Most of the adjustment is just getting comfortable with a new set of keys. Despite first appearances, this should not be fundamentally difficult, especially for someone who has used CPM, DOS, Linux and Mac and made all the corresponding adjustments; those adjustments always require some ability to self- teach and some patience with things being different, which is all you need to become productive in Vim for any kind of editing. My background is similar to yours and for me, adjusting to Vim was really a matter of patience more than difficulty. I feel that many ordinary, nontechnical computer users of today would not have the patience to learn WordStar. Programming only comes in if you start writing your own scripts, and you would know if that was something you needed to do. Otherwise, don't worry about it.
Everyone mentions the tutorial because working through it a couple of times is a good way to get through those first few days, to the point where there is much less temptation to give up. (I'm sorry I don't have the details on how to run it in macvim, but actually it is just a text file which you copy and work on using vim - all 'vimtutor' does is copy the file and open the copy in vim for you to edit). My path included changing some key mappings in vimrc to get more comfortable, but try the tutorial first (in the end I have undone most of my key remappings to be more efficient). Don't be afraid of people calling you names if you use the arrow keys or something - it's up to you how much hand motion you can endure ;) You can change almost everything later. After that, the speed of your learning really depends on how much of your work you can push to Vim. Vim is great for anyone who wants to work on text exclusively from the keyboard, and well worth spending a few less-productive days to get used to. If you learn it, you get an editor which will follow you to pretty much every platform, which is fast and lightweight, which can be customized to almost arbitrary needs, and which already has a lot of good user-developed plugins. This combination is not so common. You don't need to dive down to its full depth just to use it, but it's really nice to have that depth there when you want it. The down side you have noticed is that it isn't very "discoverable," since learning it does require reading documentation (e.g. :help). If you prefer pretty and simple and a highly discoverable, mouse-centered interface with default keys that are the same as most other editors, right out of the box, then there are a lot of editors which are better for that. -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
