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Any language takes some time to understand and even more to use effectively.

Understanding Vim's nOm command pattern is pretty easy (repeat n times operator O to text motion command m moves over). But using it effectively takes some practice. Committing it to muscle memory takes about 6 months (same amount of time it takes to master touch typing). You cannot do this faster.

Becoming an expert (which means not only effectively choosing and using commands to transform some text, but knowing a decent subset of entire functionality and also knowing how to extend the functionality) takes even more time.

And if your language were that primitive that mastering it can be done in a day or two, would it really be that complete and high level enough?



That wasn't true for me. Working through vimtutor for vim and the `C-h t' tutorial for emacs, followed by some spaced repetition over the next few weeks, got the basic motion commands of both editors fully ingrained in my muscle memory. It took longer for my fingers to internalize using operators on text objects in vim, but you can definitely master the basics in a few days. Even though I use vim as my daily editor and haven't really used emacs (at least with emacs-style keybindings) since working through the interactive tutorial years ago, it only takes me a few seconds to get comfortable navigating an emacs buffer without having to think.

Granted, emacs keybindings deliberately don't constitute a language (the whole point of emacs is to remap them for different functionality in different contexts), but I don't think it took me much longer to "become an expert" at vim's language of editing.


Wow! That takes guts. I just gave up and switched to vim keybindings in all my editors and bash.


Lispers and Smalltalkers would tell you: Maybe, if you're lucky.




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