Putting the article's content aside, how many "beginner's guides" to Vim do we really need? It seems like every other week I find a new author writing about basic vim commands. Now, considering the article's content-- I'm not sure it contained anything that couldn't be learned from `vimtutor`, but it's been quite a while since I've run it.
Pretty much nothing from this article is in vimtutor, as I learned using that and don't recognize any of these commands. It teaches cw, dw, things like that, but it doesn't go into depth like this article.
You're right. I mistook vimtutor for the first chapter of a Vim book I have, although I did make a point to indicate that I wasn't 100% sure in the OP.
I've been using vi for 15+ years and full-time for development for about a year. There were at least 3 of these that I wasn't aware of which I will now commit to memory.
Certainly a beginner could learn this stuff right away, but I wouldn't consider it inherently beginner-oriented. Personally I don't think one canonical tutorial or reference is as effective as a large number of articles focused on things that different individuals find useful. Vim is just too big to absorb through one gargantuan tutorial.
My guess is that it's a combination of a) a lot of people are learning Vim right now and b) a lot of these people have blogs.
Coming to Vim from some other editor is an awesome experience for them and they want to share.
I know: I've been using Vim daily since one year now (coming from TextMate) and I've posted 20+ random tricks as I learned them. I'm currently drafting my "one year with Vim" post.
So if I rewrite an existing program from scratch and it takes 10x longer than just using the existing one, but one person uses the program, it's still worth the time?
I think that one person could have found the information from an existing source, such as _:help text-objects_. That isn't to say that the article is useless; it's just redundant.
The post covers material outside of Vim's help system (e.g. some Vim scripts that create new text objects), and provides a different presentation that might be helpful to someone learning the concept. I think that's valuable.
