I keep seeing a comment pop up here and there on the web that is starting to anoy me just a little. Long time vim (vi) users seem to be constantly explaining how wonderful their favorite editor is and then say that there is a steep learning curve to using vim.
Quite frankly, that is a load of bull.
In their defense, for many of them it has been many years since they used anything but a full featured text editor.
They forget that their target audience is used to notepad and the like where simple things like search and replace are still new and shiny toys.
I say this because most of these speaches at least indicate that they are targeted at relative newbies.
A word of advice, it takes less than five minutes to learn enough about vim to do everything you can do in notepad or nano.
Unless you are using something similar to emacs, or one of he vi offshoots it will take you less than a day to get up to the same level of productivity in vi that you are at in your current editor.
At that point you can learn all the scary bits that everyone talks about at your leisure.
Don’t be scared. Give it a try. Worst thing that can happen is that you don’t like it and go back to whatever you are already using.
And for those who have found the ideal text editor for use on their local machine, vim is still worth playing with. It truely excels at editing files on a remote server.
If you have shell access to the machine, then there is a good chance that vi is already installed or that your admin will be willing to install it for you.
If you are the admin, there us a version of vim for pretty much every OS. 🙂
Vim is not a pretty editor, but what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in style.