It's modal nature is somewhat astonishing at first : Why would a text editor have a mode that does not input text? The reason becomes a bit more clear when you consider that about half the time of an average text editing session is spent tumbling to and from characters/words. And by separating those two modes, Vim effectively doubles the available keystroke space.
Originally, I struggled with a number of false starts with picking up Vim. Persistance paid off. And the resources that helped me most were:
- The built in vimtutor or the browser based openvim .
- The videos at vimcast.org are a gentle, practical introduction to Vim's day to day use. These videos got me to the critical point of applying Vim idioms to my real world projects.
- Beautiful wallpaper by Ted Naleid. (My personal variant is attached.)
I also recommend finding a nice .vimrc :
- https://github.com/wgibbs/vim-irblack (my initial starting point)
- https://github.com/miketon/vimrc (tuned to my personal workflow)
(The jj macro to switch modes will be kinder on your fingers than having to reach for the escape key.)
Vim is ~20 years old, yet IMHO manages to feel ahead of the curve.