I also had that experience with emacs, which has a built in help system. I couldn't find a topic on 'exit' or 'quit' and refused to just search online.

Took me half an hour.

Doesn't matter we will tell you either way.

• Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses "chords". Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.
• Because of this there's no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.
• this let's me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.

* I use "intuitively" here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.

You shouldn't talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.

tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

It's extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it's incomprehensible to newbies. It's focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.

These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.

For example:

w is a movement command that moves one word forward.

You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so 3w moves three words forward.

d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes the next three words.

f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So f. will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.

Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing d2f.

Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think "I wish there was a better way to do this" there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).

It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to ~~salvation~~ efficient editing.

Getting used to vim has made nano unusable for me. The muscle memory is too strong. That and all of the regex and plugin features (ex. LSP) are just too useful.

Exactly, it is lovely. Editing text with it is actually enjoyable.

Performing all those whacky movements and operations is nothing short of an arcade gaming experience.

vanilla helix is so nice, the keybindings make so much more sense and it feels really comfortable

With evil installed

I tend to work on customer systems where I'm not allowed to install anything. I've yet to encounter one that doesn't have vi installed, but I've seen a few without nano.

Repeat as necessary.

I'm sure someone already made a graph plotting the hours wasted learning vs the seconds gained not moving your mouse.

yes