When I first heard about vi and ran it, I grew confused and frustrated. I couldn’t do anything when I ran it, and I couldn’t even exit. I tried typing help but it displayed an error (No File). Then I tried typing quit, and it said something about recording and then insert, and then a lone ‘t’ showed up on the screen. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to use such a monstrosity of a text editor.
I must admit that my first experience was less than ideal and I don’t recall how I eventually exited, but I used Pico for my text editing needs until eventually someone told me the basics of getting around in vi. What they told me was quite simple: Use ‘i’ for insert mode, escape for command mode and ‘h’, ‘j’, ‘k’ and ‘l’ to move around. Ever since that brief introduction, I’ve been a loyal user of vi.
If you’re interested in trying it out yourself (there’s even a windows version) this vi tutorial is a good start.
Whenever people complain about vim i first refer them to this. Very handy to start with.
That was my same reaction to VI when I had to use it.
Then I opened the “help” menu that was where I was very very very lost.
Finally a quick google search brought up my handy dandy vi cheat sheet.
I totally agree with you. My first Vim encounter brought nothing but confusion and dark thoughts towards “simple” text editors. Now I have Vim commands tied into as many applications as I can. One feature of Vim that I recently found extremely useful in comparing source code, is [vimdiff]. I am by no means a Vim-superuser, but it has certainly made my life easier.