Fun with vim?

I installed the vim tutorial. Thirty minutes? Ha! It took me a couple of hours. I think part of the problem was that I found it to be really quite tedious to work through (and also I'm dealing with some sciatica) so I had to get up every now & then for a break.

I started a list of pros & cons (or as we say in the UA Libraries, "plus / deltas") but really can't come up with many pluses. The only one I could think of was that some of the commands are very clever. They allow you to do complicated tasks with a few keystrokes and/or one command line. I can see how they could be useful for people editing code as was mentioned in the tutorial for the % command that is useful when debugging a program with unmatched parentheses.

The deltas for me included:

• hard to see where the cursor is
• generally hard to read the text (especially some characters)
• difficult to remember complex commands

(Maybe it's my aging eyes and brain that handicap me!)

I did find that I easily started using some commands like the ones for moving around the screen. I was quite tickled by the command that turned on the highlighting for the term being searched (:set hls).

The whole experience started to unearth memories of commands I had used way back in the past (or maybe not so long ago), like ctrl-Page Down or ctrl-Page Up. I found that they worked in vim.

By the way, I had a real problem with Section 7.2 "Create a Startup Script". I did not understand what we were supposed to do there. I tried the command :e ~/.vimrc and got what appeared to be an error message "E37 no write since last change (add! to override)".

All in all, I can't see myself switching from Word for vim. I guess I'll be using it in this course though so maybe I'll see more of how it will be useful for digital information management purposes. :-)