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Jibz:
So, you find yourself reading a discussion somewhere about text editors or IDEs, and that one guy mentions Vim. You start to think about how awesome it would be to know Vim, how all the cool kids seem to do. There's something special about a text editor that works entirely different from all other text editors. You seem to remember sometime last year where you tried to learn Vim, but you can't quite put your finger on why you didn't end up being a Vim pro.

That's right, it's time for ...

The Annual Vim Experiment ;D

It's been long enough since the last time that you've forgotten the time it took to play with .vimrc to get something that looked halfway usable. You've repressed the countless hours of fumbling around and googling just to edit a few lines of text. You can't remember the aggrevation of every single other program on your computer doing random things as you involuntarily used a Vim shortcut that was on it's way into your muscle memory. If you're using Windows, you've forgotten how half the plugins are a pain to install because they assume Ruby or Python or something else. And if you're using a non-US keyboard, you also forgot how 5% of the commands were hard or impossible to press.

All of that is far enough away in your memory that you are ready to give it another try. And who knows, maybe this time you will succeed if you get the right help -- the question is what are the best resources to get you going?

phitsc:
I'm in :Thmbsup:

First pointer is an article right on top of the vim web site about installing gvim on Windows.

Jibz:
Being able to install it seems like a good starting point :Thmbsup:.

I've managed to get it running, and this time around I decided to try to stop myself from trying to install a bunch of fancy plugins. I seem to remember that was part of what killed me last time -- I had to fight with learning plugins as well as Vim.

So, I've got Vim, pathogen, sensible, commentary, and of course my favorite color scheme solarized.

Hmm, guess I am not doing too well on skipping plugins am I? :-[

Here are some resources I am looking at:

Vim Tips Wiki with some links to resources
Learn Vim Progressively
The Vim Learning Curve is a Myth
Vim Adventures a game, how odd?
Vimcasts

(Btw, I might have sneaked a set guifont=Dina:h8:cANSI into my .vimrc as well :P)

ewemoa:
This year marks my 20th year using vi, but I still don't know that many commands.

I keep forgetting useful ones through lack of use -- this is the sort of thing that I think "standard" GUIs can be helfpul for (i.e. rediscovery).

For emacs I made a small bit of code that presents a menu of commands I'm trying to learn (those that aren't already show via menus).

I'd be interested to see if there's something like that for vi -- as a first step I've installed gvim so that I can leverage the menus.


My .emacs contains a line specifying the Dina font -- when I set up a new machine I often get a start-up error because I haven't installed Dina yet ;)

Jibz:
The whole buffer vs window vs tab page distinction seems a little convoluted;

Summary:
   A buffer is the in-memory text of a file.
   A window is a viewport on a buffer.
   A tab page is a collection of windows.-Vim help
--- End quote ---

must be written by a programmer ;D.

By default you can't open a file, make a change and then open another file without saving the first one. That seems odd, but I am sure there is some Unix explanation for it.

Also, by default vim doesn't open another file from the same folder as the current one. If you just opened "C:\data\long\path\foo.c", and then want to open foo.h from the same folder, you need the entire path again. I know there's command history, but you get what I mean -- most other editors would start by looking in the same folder.

I think it adds a bit to the complexity of starting to use Vim that you have to fiddle with settings to get it to behave similar to what you would expect.

I should probably try vimtutor again :-[.

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