Intermediate lists always fascinate me. How do people decide what’s between “beginner” and “advanced”? I always thought of myself as an “intermediate” vim user, until reading intermediate lists that clearly weren’t aimed at me.
I’d like to see this for advanced users by someone with the credentials to write it. I’m sure I have tons to learn still, like I have no idea when I’d use the arglist though I kinda know how I’d do it, but this gave me nothing.
Maybe there should be a low-intermediate level, for which this is a fine article, as it doesn’t focus on the “vim is a grammar, here’s how you speak it” level, but it doesn’t feel like it’s far beyond the basics either. This presupposes the “advanced” list would be indistinguishable from magic and only a logical guess says there must be something between this and magic.
I tried to write an “intermediate” list and failed, I think it came out as a bit too advanced. Here it is!
EDIT: A couple days ago I needed to do an interactive regex replace across a hundred files. I loaded them all in with args * and then used argdo %s/regex/here/ceg.
I remember having seen that and it’s actually perfect for high-intermediate or even advanced!
But I’m also thinking that maybe it’s like @arp242 replied, that mastery isn’t knowing every feature. Could be mastery is grinding basic- and intermediate-lists until you’re fluent in Vim.
What annoys me about editor jihads is that I’ve seen people who are completely inept with whatever editor they use, and I’ve seen people rock the shit out of their editors.
This backs up the feeling that this is pretty subjective, and fluency roughly equals mastery. The editor itself is secondary to a commitment to striving for excellence.
(Just don’t conflate thst with oh-my-zsh-style installing every plugin on top of someone else’s .vim/ or and thinking that’s the way. It might get the job done, but isn’t educational unless you make it an educational exercise for yourself.)
I’m sure I have tons to learn still, like I have no idea when I’d use the arglist though I kinda know how I’d do it
I don’t think “Vim mastery” means “know how to use every Vim feature”; but rather something like “being able to use Vim effectively”. Some people might do that with the arglist, others don’t.
Years ago I was at a conference where Bram Molenaar gave a presentation about some programming language he was working on; at some point someone organised a small impromptu Vim Q&A session. Two or three questions were answered with “ehm, I’m not sure how this works exactly, I never use this”.
The arglist in particular is something that I looked at and just didn’t really find all that useful. Some people find it useful, but if you ask me a lot of these kind of features stem from a time when 1) loading a few text files in memory was something that took a lot of % of your memory, and 2) updating text on your serial terminal was an expensive operation you actually had to wait for. Commands like :arglist, :next, etc. make sense in that context, but for the most part it’s been somewhat obsolete for a very long time IMO now that we have tabs and whatnot. There’s no real reason to learn it if you’re not already used with it.
Intermediate lists always fascinate me. How do people decide what’s between “beginner” and “advanced”? I always thought of myself as an “intermediate” vim user, until reading intermediate lists that clearly weren’t aimed at me.
I’d like to see this for advanced users by someone with the credentials to write it. I’m sure I have tons to learn still, like I have no idea when I’d use the arglist though I kinda know how I’d do it, but this gave me nothing.
Maybe there should be a low-intermediate level, for which this is a fine article, as it doesn’t focus on the “vim is a grammar, here’s how you speak it” level, but it doesn’t feel like it’s far beyond the basics either. This presupposes the “advanced” list would be indistinguishable from magic and only a logical guess says there must be something between this and magic.
Or all this is too subjective to be figured out.
I tried to write an “intermediate” list and failed, I think it came out as a bit too advanced. Here it is!
EDIT: A couple days ago I needed to do an interactive regex replace across a hundred files. I loaded them all in with
args *and then usedargdo %s/regex/here/ceg.I remember having seen that and it’s actually perfect for high-intermediate or even advanced!
But I’m also thinking that maybe it’s like @arp242 replied, that mastery isn’t knowing every feature. Could be mastery is grinding basic- and intermediate-lists until you’re fluent in Vim.
What annoys me about editor jihads is that I’ve seen people who are completely inept with whatever editor they use, and I’ve seen people rock the shit out of their editors.
This backs up the feeling that this is pretty subjective, and fluency roughly equals mastery. The editor itself is secondary to a commitment to striving for excellence.
(Just don’t conflate thst with
oh-my-zsh-style installing every plugin on top of someone else’s.vim/or and thinking that’s the way. It might get the job done, but isn’t educational unless you make it an educational exercise for yourself.)I don’t think “Vim mastery” means “know how to use every Vim feature”; but rather something like “being able to use Vim effectively”. Some people might do that with the arglist, others don’t.
Years ago I was at a conference where Bram Molenaar gave a presentation about some programming language he was working on; at some point someone organised a small impromptu Vim Q&A session. Two or three questions were answered with “ehm, I’m not sure how this works exactly, I never use this”.
The arglist in particular is something that I looked at and just didn’t really find all that useful. Some people find it useful, but if you ask me a lot of these kind of features stem from a time when 1) loading a few text files in memory was something that took a lot of % of your memory, and 2) updating text on your serial terminal was an expensive operation you actually had to wait for. Commands like
:arglist,:next, etc. make sense in that context, but for the most part it’s been somewhat obsolete for a very long time IMO now that we have tabs and whatnot. There’s no real reason to learn it if you’re not already used with it.Probably not a secret, but the book Practical Vim is a good read for “intermediate users”.
I’d just like Vim to work with Python without any issues or errors. But alas it was not meant to be.