I don't think this covers the main reason I only use vim occasionally: it is the only reasonable editor available over ssh by default on all VMs deployed in your typical org. Over there it usually has default settings, and it's not trivial to change configs or install other editors.
Worthy attempt, looks cool, but I'm still stuck with having to learn the basics of moving a cursor around reasonably :(
> A: I did, but if you don't use vim regularly, you keep forgetting them.
The basics are only useful in vim, and editors that you force into vim mode. Other places one types text into which use the same conventions absent in vim: browser input fields, the url bar, email, office software, random input fields in games (I've seen single file libraries that obey the same conventions of moving across words that you get in office), publishing software, chat clients... Vim is the only outsider, and because I only need it rarely, I forget things and I accidentally use the shortcuts from other software which sometimes break things.
I know enough vim, but I keep using conventions from other software out of habit, and shortcuts do other things. Vim is great editor, but a horrible thing to use by default simply because it was made before text editing ux got standardized.
You’d be surprised how much software has VIM bindings built-in or a plugin to add them. This includes browsers, email and office software.
More importantly for me personally, is that VIM is a lot more ergonomic than the “standard” Windows-style text-editing ux you prefer. It played a crucial role in helping me (mostly) recover from severe repetitive stress injuries. Many, many others are in the same boat.
I wish I’d started using it in earnest years sooner. IMO, it’s worth learning even if you never have wrist problems. I write, and especially edit, blog posts faster now with it than I could prior to injury when I could type faster.
As a vimer, this is absolutely true. Learning is repetition, not just reading. And we don’t have time to learn something we rarely use.
For the same reason I can never even think of writing in ahk, awk, bash, scss and other arcane syntaxes without examples and snippets. Because the usage is occasional.
And I definitely hit Esc and lost my input too many times. Of course the apps that don’t ask for Esc confirmation are to blame, but they exist.
And you can forget them in the next 15 minutes. Been there, done that.
As the article says, if you don't use it regularly you'll never learn it by heart, and Vi doesn't have any affordances that will remind you of what you learned by recognition instead of recall.
You can make it better and remap CapsLock to be Escape.
Now you are not constrained to use vim but can actually enjoy using it (and now you can try your fav shell's vim mode and become a command line ninja, imagine going up and down your command history with j/k and searching with your command history with just /)
Thankfully you can usually find nano installed, which is an order of magnitude superior to vi(m). If I'm in a shell I want an editor to get in, edit a couple of lines, and get out, which nano excels at.
Worthy attempt, looks cool, but I'm still stuck with having to learn the basics of moving a cursor around reasonably :(