syntruth wrote:Vim has been growing on me. [...]
You should get that looked at. It could be fatal.
[...] Since then, I am -really- starting to appreciate the power of vim, even if I still charge it with being cryptic as all get out.
The biggest issue I find with how people learn vi/vim is the learning process itself. Often a new user is given a cheatsheet and told, "Here -- memorize this." As though memorization was a good way to learn something! (Shades of chemistry and the Periodic Table...)
I put together a cheatsheet that I use in my Unix courses where I break down all of the vi commands into two columns: operators and operands. Then all of the vi commands are, "take one from column A and one from column B." Operators are things like delete, insert, change, replace, and so on. They specify the action to perform. Operators are the hjkl keys, the string search function, and anything else that moves the cursor. They specify how much text the action should be manipulating.
You can find my cheatsheet
here by scrolling down towards the bottom of the list.
There are a few commands that don't follow the columnA/columnB paradigm, mostly as shortcuts. Things like "dd" to delete one line or "." to re-execute the previous change. The primary offenders in that regard are summarized on the cheatsheet as well, but there are others (built-in macros like "A", "D", and "ZZ" are good examples).
Apparently a lot of people like that cheatsheet since it now appears in the first 5-10 hits on Google when searching for "vi cheatsheet".