Frequently Asked Question

Where do I actually start? What is the fastest path from nothing to productive?

The single most efficient first hour is to run vimtutor at the shell. It is a small interactive lesson, shipped with every Vim installation, that walks you through the eight or so commands that cover the great majority of everyday editing: h j k l to move, i and Esc to enter and leave insert mode, x and dd to delete, :w and :q to save and quit, / to search, :s/foo/bar/g to substitute. Twenty-five minutes, no setup.

After that, the highest-leverage next investment is MIT's Missing Semester lecture on Editors (a one-hour video, freely available) and Drew Neil's Practical Vim book, which is structured as bite-sized tips. Use Vim for everything for two weeks even though it will feel slower than what you are used to. Resist the urge to install plugins; learn the defaults first. At the end of two weeks, you will be back to your previous speed, and from there it only gets faster.

For nano, there is essentially nothing to learn beyond reading the command menu at the bottom of the screen. Five minutes with the official cheatsheet is enough for the rest of your career. The asymmetry is the point: pay the hour cost of vi once and you have it forever; nano pays you back every time you need a one-line edit without thinking.