This was a nice intro to vim, showing the concepts fast. I was just wondering about the match braces commands. I propose that you show off the yank registers, and the @ macro function as well, along with the marks. Another great command is q: and q/. Another area is movement with marks, and filtering, maybe filtering isn't that easy to implement in your tutorial.
Pretty nice review and I agree with most of your comments.
I agree that it seems strange to teach Ctrl+^ for previous file. (Not symmetrical, and doesn't really mean previous anyway.) However, particularly for the purpose of teaching newbies, I think :Next would be even more confusing... and I could be wrong about this, but I think the number of people who need to care about learning vi (as opposed to vim) is really small, if it even extends beyond communities of people who think that things created 20 years ago are newfangled.
Pretty neat. Even though I've been using Vim as my only editor for years I learned a new movement command from lesson 1. (I didn't realize you use ^ to go to the beginning of text on a line. I always use 0 and the w forward. )
2 suggestions though:
1. I felt like the randomizer kept giving me questions I had just answered correctly multiple times. That was a little annoying, but probably is less noticeable when you are in sections where you are learning new things.
2. It only accepts d2w for "delete 2 words" but 2dw is also correct. I actually think 2dw makes more sense since it is consistent with 2dd to 2yy which are much faster to type then d2d.
Just typing that made me feel bad for Bram Moolenaar because vim users must be impossible to support.
A couple of minor criticisms (as an intermediate Vim user):
- I felt like it was too easy to just stare at the key instruction on the top left and just ignore how you're navigating the block of text itself. As you are letting people know what commands are being introduced in the next lesson, maybe they should only be shown if the student wants a hint?
- It seems like the only way to go to the next lesson on completion (without using the mouse) is to tab once then hit enter. Maybe that could be a keyboard command as well? `n` maybe?
Thanks. Yes, * is good, but only if you already are at the word you want to search for. When that's not the case, in Emacs I hit C-s, typed the first few letters, found the word, grabbed it with C-w, then hit C-s repeatedly. In Vim, I haven't found quite the same convenient way. I have been getting out of incremental search, then used *, but it's a few more key strokes, especially if the first hit is not the word I'm looking for.
Damn, I've been using vim for almost a decade and didn't realize that /<term> worked as a movement so you can do things like y2/foo and yank to the second occurrence of “foo” (to use the example from the tutorial).
That's why I scan every beginner vim tutorial that comes across hn. I always learn something
You should at least learn to use hjklnmyu and prefix them with numbers, you're not really getting anything special out of VIM if you're using arrow keys or leaving homerow. Add on e and b for extra credit
Many of the things here, as of writing, are quite elementary Vim tips. A lesser known trick that I learnt quite recently and have found very useful is `gn`, which visually selects the next search hit (similarly `gN` for the previous hit). That's not so useful in itself, but it can be combined with an operation, such as `c` or `y`, etc., which can then be repeated using the `.`.
Absolutely love both of these, thank you so much. My only nitpick would be that when you have text typed, say '$ vim' and go up, finding '$vim somefile', then going down again should bring you back to what you originally typed. This is also the behaviour in vim, I believe.
> in Vim you use $ to move to end of line, and ^ to move to begin of line. Not only is it unintuitive
To be fair, that is intuitive if you learned regexes before VIM.
The important part is those motion commands compose. If I wanted to visually select up until the end of the line, I can type v$ — if I want to delete everything from this position to the start of the line, I could type d^. In the middle of a word that needs to disappear? diw (delete in-word). Do I want to copy that word? yiw (yank in-word). Eventually, outside of composing macros (another great feature), you don't really think about the underlying letters of finger movements to perform a certain task; you just do it.
It's not for everyone, and it does come with a downside of making every other code editor feel borderline unusable unless it comes with a good VIM plugin (Jetbrains' suite of IDEs are great for this, and VSCode is pretty good).
In the vim section, you might want to cover `*` - go to next match of current word and `#` - go to previous match of current word
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