Earlier this semester our teacher gave us an assignment to learn vi (vim or gvim), and make a sheet cheat in order to learn how powerful the vim editor is. When I tried to make a sheet cheat I didn’t feel that I was learning something, which is the reason I started to look for other ways to learn how to use the editor. I stumbled upon a tutorial which is installed automatic if you install the full version of vim (most linux distributions come with a light version of vim so you have to install full version in order to get the tutorial).
To start the tutorial you just open a terminal and type “vimtutor”, the tutorial encourage the learning by doing method and is divided into small chapters which give you more and more insight on how powerful the editor is. The tutorial is opened in vim and it encourage you to do small tasks inside the tutorial while you’re reading.
I found this tutorial very efficient on learning the basic stuff, and would recommend every new user to go through this guide a couple of times instead of writing a sheet cheat. After you feel comfortable with the basics and how commands work it’s possible to make a sheet cheat with more advanced commands which isn’t used that often.
If you’re going to write code in the vim editor I would suggest to enable some features which gives you syntax highlight and smart indentation etc (type :help in normal mode to get more information on what you can do). If you’re going to write documents i would suggest to take a look at laTeX.
