A way to learn Vim

I was just cleaning out some old directories and found the photo below from when I was learning Vim. If anyone is trying to learn Vim (or another editor with a lot of commands like Emacs) and has a fixed desk, this technique might be useful.

I printed some Vim cheatsheets and taped them to the wall next to my desk at work. Whenever I would get stuck in Vim, I would look over at the wall and learn an efficient command for that task. (no arrow keys allowed)

learning-vim

If you want to force yourself to not use arrow keys, paste this in your .vimrc file – it will cause the arrow keys to resize splits rather than move the cursor:

" Arrow keys resize splits
nnoremap <Up>    :resize +2<CR>
nnoremap <Down>  :resize -2<CR>
nnoremap <Left>  :vertical resize +2<CR>
nnoremap <Right> :vertical resize -2<CR>

The cheat sheets are great, but I also think it’s important to learn Vim’s grammar. The grammar helped me make sense of the keystrokes and also helped me come up with them on the fly based on a few commands I am familiar with.

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