K, maybe the jump to the closing bracket is useful, but you can do that in gedit too, and frankly, I think the jump happens quickly, so you don't get a feel of how far away the closing bracket in. Does anyone find that people who use vim tend to have longer files than people who use gedit? I find that using a graphical scroll makes you appreciate how many lines your file is, and how it's organized. Personally, I try to keep my files as short as possible. Any function should be able to fit in a screenshot.

Now I'm regretting my earlier post. Dude, you've said "There is nothing shameful about using a graphical editor" three times. We get it, except methinks you doth protest too much. And now you've gone from defending your right to use a manly graphical editor (which I support) to trying to make vim out to be nearly useless. You should quit while you're ahead. If you're using a cheatsheet to use vim, YDIW.

Besides, gvim *is* a graphical editor. But there's nothing shameful in using the console version.

I disagree. Sure, for quick sysadmin editing tasks, vi/m is the defacto go to choice. But that in large part is due to it's ubiquity rather than superiority. In the early days Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping was not just a joke so the slimmer vi was the logical choice to bundle. In more modern times, 8 megs is less than a tenth of a Firefox instance. Had early machines come with a gig of ram out of the gate, the story might well have played out differently, as for bigger and/or more varied jobs I think emacs holds an advantage and I think more people would have adopted it as the swiss army knife of editors.

Interestingly, although vi/m wins the editor popularity contest, many, if not most, distributions command line editing defaults to emacs mode. I used to have a pretty highly customized .kshrc and used vi mode but then I accidentally nuked it one day when I thought I had a copy elsewhere. I was bringing a system online and in a hurry so I didn't bother tweaking .kshrc and just went with the defaults. After a few days I started being more comfortable in emacs mode and really came to appreciate my newfound freedom from reaching for the escape key every time I needed to switch modes. Switching back to vi mode I found that I felt less efficient. So, one thing naturally led to another and I found myself taking a fresh look at emacs itself. And the more I use emacs, the more I like it. Yeah, I still use vi daily for the sysadmin edit tasks, but when I need to write or document things beyond a page or two, I go to emacs.

My $0.02. ymmv

This is actually pretty funny. Of course there's viper mode for those who must have vi editing syntax.

Oh wow, someone else caught that too, huh?

It's a discussion only when you explain your preferences and the logic behind your position. Such analysis can be very interesting and enlightening, especially for newbies who've not heard it before, an audience lq purports to cater to. Hence, I think such discussions are appropriate for this forum. comp.unix might be a different story... The cheerleader, fanboy, me too" posts, however, are just noise to be filtered. Unfortunate, but not cause to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I use both vi and emacs. I used vi a LOT for MANY years. In retrospect, however, I should have spent more time with emacs sooner. Like a decade or two. I don't care, nor have anything against those who prefer vi/m. I'm merely suggesting that they may want to go outside of their comfort zone long enough to give emacs a good test drive.

Of course it also depends a lot on needs. If you spend the day clicking on links in your browser, and/or your box is more of an htpc than workstation, there's not much need for an editor.

there is nothing wrong with using a cheatsheet. surely you haven't memorized every spelling and don't use spellcheck?

i mainly use vim, but i am attempting to learn emacs. (its not going so well :/ )

I didn't follow the part about spellchecking but, no, I didn't mean I have everything memorized. Far from it. What I meant was that using a cheatsheet is basically trying to use vim like a nano or what have you, where you have a pile of keys and when you hit one, one thing happens and that's the end of your options. There is no one key for, e.g., 'convert this plain text file into html interactively' but you can do it in vim in a few sets of keystrokes. But I wouldn't want to think about doing it in some other editors. (Ideally, you'd do it with sed or awk (or perl) rather than interactively, but that can be a real chainsaw to apply when you're just doing some pruning.) Vim (and emacs, I'm sure, and maybe a handful of others) are sort of a text editing workbench from which you can access and apply all the editor's internal power and bits of sed and sort and wc and everything else from the general *nix toolkit to construct "solutions" to your text editing problems. It's hooked into the system rather than sealed off like most simple or graphical or non-*nix editors. So learning to use it involves reading the large book's worth of documentation that comes with it (not all at once, of course, but dipping into it and trying to maximize your returns) as you encounter problems and think about them, rather than just memorizing a cheatsheet. If your editing needs are going to be handled with a cheatsheet then you can use most any editor. And, as I've been trying to say but, apparently, not very well, that's fine.

Anyway - hopefully I didn't express myself poorly this time. Either way, I need to get out of this thread.

I found the cheatsheet very helpful while starting off trying to learn vim. After a while I wasn't looking at it much.

I made a genuine effort to get really good at vim. Some of my coworkers were real wizards at it, and it looked like you can do stuff really quickly. The built in regex global search and replace (s///g) is very useful. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to put down vim. I recognize that it is a very powerful text editing tool. However, after using it for about a year, and then doing a project on gedit, I found it such a relief to go back to a graphical editor. Sometimes power is well worth sacrificing for ease and intuitiveness of use.

By the way, how about the comment I made about vim users' tendency to have longer functions/files. Does anyone else find that to be the case?

gedit should have won this hands down.

*sits back and waits for angry responses from vi/vim/emacs users*

Horses for courses. When I want to make a note of something, or edit a configuration file, I use gedit. When I go su in a terminal, I use nano. And when I want to carry out complex re-arrangement of data, I start up my QL emulator and use The Editor (1985 vintage). Who can resist a command line where you can type things like
2s rp fcw/LW/ bs be p sm t ns bm cm

I use gnote for taking quick notes and commands down, gedit either when I'm lazy or need to copy/paste lots of information, and vi when on the command line.

$gedit
(gedit:10312): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

How usefull

GEdit still beats them all as far as I'm concerned. But I'm gonna give GVim a try (GUI version of VIM)