Help me understand vim motions

The thing that helped me and sort of made the whole modal concept "click", was thinking about it is a grammar. There are vim nouns, vim verbs and using those on text objects. Here is a good tutorial to get started.

I'm going to recommend doing the hard work and not wrapping any funky language around Vim. These are the fundamentals:

It's a modal text editor. "escape" for neutral, "i" to edit before the character, "I" at the start of the line, "a" to edit after the character, "A" at the end of the line. :w to write the file, :q to quit, ":" to do stuff, and ":q!:" if you don't know wtf you're doing. Hit "escape" if you feel lost, and when in doubt, force exit with :q! to not save. If you can't enter ":", press "escape" until you can, and hit ":q!" until vi/vim quits (you might have hit F1, which starts Help, which can be confusing).

I once got a call from a coworker who opened vim on a Linux server and didn't know how to close it. We all had a light-hearted chuckle and moment of commiseration. My early Linux days saw me opening vi and getting similarly lost.

I started with vi/vim on a practical foundation. vi is everywhere, vim is its advanced cousin, so if you know the UNIXy little brother you're set.

Have you done vimtutor? That's the official tutorial and generally the best way to get started.

If you have regular vim, just run the vimtutor command in your terminal

If you have Neovim, open it, then type the :Tutor command and press enter.

The two versions are basically the same, the Neovim one is just a bit more interactive and improved a bit in some places, but they both teach the same basic motions and concepts.

If you actually intend to try and use it as your main editor, I strongly recommend Neovim over regular vim. There's basically no reason to use vim over nvim, as nvim has much better defaults in many places and Lua configuration is much nicer than Vimscript, especially when you start adding plugins.

Also, if you want to write a Neovim config, I HIGHLY recommend you check out kickstart.nvim.

It is a small "starting point" for nvim configuration. It sets up all the useful things like autocompletion for you. But it's very thoroughly documented and explains how it works in great detail, so you can easily go in and start changing things to perfectly fit your needs (which is the entire point of configurable editors).

From their own description:

Kickstart.nvim is a starting point for your own configuration.
The goal is that you can read every line of code, top-to-bottom, understand
what your configuration is doing, and modify it to suit your needs.

Once you've done that, you can start exploring, configuring and tinkering to
make Neovim your own! That might mean leaving Kickstart just the way it is for a while
or immediately breaking it into modular pieces. It's up to you!

I like to think of vim as spellcasting. Or a combo chaining video game for editing text. The first time I watched somebody use vim at an advanced level it was like watching a wizard raising a mountain out of the ground and forming into a castle. I use vim daily, and I still wouldn't consider myself advanced. I just learned enough to be 90% more productive.

You're chaining together all sorts of operators to perform an action. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they are arcane. But it imbibes a sense of power.

:wq is one such example. "Command, write (to disk), quit". Drop the w, add an ! at the end, now it is "Command, quit, forcefully." It won't save because you removed the w.

Hence why vim has Command Mode and Edit mode. You are shifting modes, between casting spells and entering text. So all that's left is to learn the spells. Here is the most useful 101. Some words need translations from Old User to Modern User.

As @knocklessmonster mentioned, if you get lost and things don't work right, hammer a combo of Escape, q, and Enter until it does nothing then force quit. There are edge cases where escape itself won't be enough to get you into command mode.

The colon is used for special commands. Unless otherwise stated, these are just typed in.

d - delete (cut)
y - yank (copy)
p - put (paste)

Paste is a one off. "Put what you have where you are."

The other two begin and end a spell. To delete a line, you type dd, the beginning and end of the spell. There are other ways of ending the spell, the one I use most is G, Go to end. By just entering that it jumps to the end. So to delete everything from where you are to the end dG.

Then you place modifiers between. Numbers are the best.

With a colon (:50), you will jump to line 50. With this combo d5d, you delete the 5 lines starting from your cursor. So a full spell:

:20
y10y
G
p

Jump to line 20, copy it and the next 9 lines, jump to the end of the file, paste them.

Maybe more later.

Highly, highly recommend the built in vimtutor.

I work as a software engineer, and use vim daily (mostly in VSCode).

About 90% of my usage is:

• ci{ or ci” for “change inside braces/quotes”
• y10y “yank from here to ten lines down”
• d10d “delete from here to ten lines down”
• cw “change word (deletes from the cursor the current word to the right, and enters insert mode for typing”
• c$ “change line (deletes from the cursor to the end of the line, and enters insert mode for typing)”

I think the best way to understand Vim is to use Vim. In abstract, it doesn't make a lot of sense. It is a tool, not a theory. I suggest doing the Vimtutor a bunch of times.

When you learn Vim, it becomes pleasurable to use. More than anything, Vim is pleasant. It won't make you 100 times more efficient; that is just silly. I don't buy into the grandstanding about Vim. It is a text editor, not a way of life. In most situations, typing speed is not a significant bottleneck, and there are many tools that do the same things Vim does. But it is pleasant.

I dunno, I took the time to learn Vim like 10 years ago when I was in university and had nothing better to do and it's like riding a bike. It was shit for months, then one day it clicked and I can just go back to it and edit text reasonable quickly.
Problem is for coding I'd just not use it today because of stuff like intellisense and stuff like the solution explorer etc all in the IDE.
I tried the Vim extension for VS code for a bit and I nearly kept it, but the way it was implemented as kinda a second class service (some Vim shortcuts got eaten by VS code) killed it in the end for me.

Anyway what I'm trying to say is, if you really want to learn Vim for whatever reason, you can I'm sure if you just restrict yourself to using it and learn the shortcuts to make the work flows reasonably quick. But it'll take a while to learn.

First, I'm using the open source branch of VSCode, VSCodium. Bypassing Microsoft marketplace restrictions is possible (I'm not sure about posting it here, but you can find it online - it's essentially a plist file edit.)

Learning Vim in a week convinced me to start Vim. The main idea I like the most is that you can learn 1-2 new bindings a week and see what sticks with you, and what you use the most daily sticks through.

I still use Vim only partially, because I sometimes don't remember the cursor jump bindings, but it's that accuracy that No Boilerplate was talking about - rather than having to manually put the cursor to where you want, either by mouse or arrow keys, you know precisely where the cursor would end up using (w), (b), (e), (g), (a)/A and so forth.

I think over time people just keep what they find useful. For me it's (o)/Shift-o for newlines, d[num]d for deleting any number of lines, and ci[bracket] to (c)hange content (i)n a bracket pair.

Also, remap your Caps Lock to Esc. escaping Insert mode with the left pinky is much more natural. (My custom keyboard layout is also mapping i to the right pinky so entering/exiting is symmetric for me, but that's beside the point)

I bounced off nvim as an IDE, in part because so many of the nvim "distros" are a bit overwhelming out of the box.
I made the switch to Helix and found it a bit easier to get into, some of the changes to vim syntax make a bit more sense to me, primarily switching the verb and noun in a lot of the actions (eg: wc for "select the next word, then change the selection" in Helix rather than cw in vim)

I leveled up in vim using vim adventures. I didn’t even know there was a built in tutorial, probably because I got the basics down using vi a long time ago.

I leveled up again pair programming with someone who was incredibly good with vim. If you ever get this opportunity, I highly recommend it once you have the basics down. The advanced stuff falls under the you don’t know what you don’t know principal. It never even occurred to me to edit columns in vim, now I use that functionality often.

I used Vim as my primary editor since I was in university in the late 90s until I switched to Helix just recently. I'm a software engineer so I probably spend around a third of my total waking hours sitting in front of an editor. A lot of people suggest that thinking of Vim keybindings as a logical grammar is useful, and that may be the case for some, but for me it's almost entirely about building muscle memory around specific tasks over time. Usually it stems from having to do some repetitive, tedious task over and over again--I'll look up how I can save myself some time with Vim keybindings and then use it whenever I come across something similar to that task until it becomes second nature. Once the small, simple time savers get engrained as muscle memory you'll find yourself moving on to more and more complex ones until you eventually become a Vim ninja.

I wrote a silly story a long time ago trying to express that same sentiment called Vim Creep.