When I started learning The Editor years ago, I tried out different things to see what is the best way of doing it. Here are some tips which may helpful to you if you’re struggling.
We won’t go into whether it’s worth learning how to use Vim. It simply is.
The hardest part about learning Vim is probably the fact that it’s just so different from anything you’ve encountered before (and it truly is). So the learning curve is quite steep, since you probably won’t even be able to quit when you first get in. I know I didn’t..
The core of the problem is that Vim has a huge amount of commands, even when it’s not extended by anything. Trying to commit a lot of commands to memory when you’ve just started using it is a recipe for a disaster. Unless you have exceptional cerebral powers, there is no way you’re going to remember anything more than a few most frequently used commands. Within this simple fact lies a trick for learning Vim properly.
The trick is: learn slowly. In order to use Vim properly and fast, you need to build up some muscle memory first. When you start using it, just moving around with hjkl will be amazingly unintuitive and slow. So don’t think about all the other commands just yet. Use your first week or two to just use Vim like a jackass: use hjkl to move around, i to go to insert mode and ESC to go back to normal mode. That’s it.
When you start getting bored with that, remember that you can spice things up with numbers: 5j, 10h etc.. You can also go to insert mode and skip to the beginning of the line with I (capital i), or go to the end of the line with $, move around with w/W/b/B. Ten words? No problem, 10w!
When you’ve started navigating with your muscle memory, the real fun begins. You’re now ready to introduce more commands, but only a few at a time (maybe even just one!). The key thing to remember is that every command you learn expands the power of Vim almost exponentially. Why? Because commands can and should be combined!
For example, if you know that 10j will move your caret 10 lines below, when you learn that d means delete, you can now do d10j to delete 10 lines below your current position (technically, you’ll delete 11 lines, your current line and 10 below it). Or d10w to delete 10 (i.e. 11) words. Or d$ to delete everything until the end of the line. Now think what you can do when you combine only the commands you can find on any Vim cheatsheet online.
The concept of combining Vim commands is precisely what makes Vim The Editor, and it is best described here: What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?. When you’ve figured that out, the rest will come naturally. Whenever you need to do something in Vim and it seems slow, there’s probably a more efficient way of doing it. You just need to find it.
Just don’t rush it!:wq