On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 09:43:16PM -0400, Eric Weir wrote: > > Well, I found time to work through the vim tutor exercise. Pretty > basic. Not sure I remember what I learned -- I liked that it said > don't try to memorize, to learn by doing -- and in a fog about some > things I'm clear about, e.g., how to open a file, how to find out > where a file is being saved, how to save a file to a specific folder, > etc., and many, many more I'm not. It will come.
Dunno if it suits your learning style, but many years ago I started keeping (very brief) notes of the most immediately useful stuff, using vim. The act of condensing a concept, and writing it down, together with the relevant commands, help with memory. Simply capitalising keywords in the file allows rapid access to the desired information, in vim, when memory fails. (Might be useful if you're one who learns a good deal more than is needed to get by up till lunchtime today.) Being customised, the personal help is often a quicker memory backup than the generalised vim help. (OK, only a small part of my accumulated 15k lines relate to vim, but it's all unix stuff, so I can find hard-won vim, awk, bash, and debugging experience in one place. It only has what I have a use for, and it only fills my memory holes, but nothing else does that better.) While I did learn vim while earning a living as a programmer, I use it for everything, including typing this post. To have mutt use vim, just add the line: set editor=vim to ~/.muttrc. (Using vim, naturally.) And when emails (or even a single word in a document) need to be in e.g. Danish or German, digraphs are easily learnt by one's fingers. ( :help :digraphs ) ( :dig ) I have vim set up so that ^D invokes Danish spell checking, and ^E does English, but that's just what suits this vimmer. (I only turn it on at completion of the document.) So yes, vim is well suited to (even multilingual) non-program text editing. Personally, I'd rather learn one interface, learn it well, and use it everywhere. (One shell, one editor, one text processing language, one OS, and one distro thereof. (Oh, alright, I don't use the vi-style line editing interface for the bash commandline. Yet. ;) At 57, I've had to enable two-coloured cursor, to distinguish insert mode. That wasn't necessary in the past. I've also made up/down arrows exit insert mode (to save a keystroke most times), while staying in it for left & right. Erik -- I have long felt that most computers today do not use electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the "pumping" motion of the mouse! - William Shotts, Jr. on http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.ph -- 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
