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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://ismail.badawi.io/blog/2014/04/23/the-compositional-nature-of-vim/ [badawi.io]

I use vim. I’ve used vim since I started programming; the very first program I wrote – hello world in C, following along a cprogramming.com tutorial – was typed out in vim, inside a cygwin environment on Windows. Naturally, at first it was hard and intimidating. I didn’t know how to do anything, least of all edit text. I learned about insert mode and normal mode. I learned about navigating using hjkl, and deleting the current line with dd, and saving and quitting with :wq, and for a long time that was it.

Over time I learned more and more. I learned that I could copy the current line with yy, and paste it somewhere with p. This meant that yyp duplicated the current line! I learned that I could indent the current line with >>, and also that I could indent the next 5 lines with 5>>. I learned that gg jumped to the top of the file. I learned that I could jump to line 34 with 34G. I also learned a strange incantation – I could write %s/foo/bar/g to replace all occurrences of foo with bar in the whole file. I used this all the time, and vim felt really powerful!

I went on like this for years. What I’m trying to get at is that I never really took the time to learn how vim worked. I had no clue about the big picture. I didn’t know any concepts. Even though I used vim for hours each day, and I felt like I was constantly improving and learning new things, and my peers in university thought me knowledgeable enough to come to me with their vim questions, really I was just getting by on ad-hoc memorization.

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