The Return of "Efficient Editing with Vim"
18 Aug 2015(A day may come when this blog isn’t non-stop Vim… but it is not this day.)
Before people learned not to mention Vim near me for fear of having a much longer conversation than they’d originally intended, they’d often ask how to get started using Vim. After this happened a few times, I built a “starter kit” message that I’d send out, full of advice and links to help them get going quickly with a minimum of frustration.
One of my favorite articles in this kit was Jonathan McPherson’s “Efficient Editing with Vim.” It did a good, no-nonsense job explaining several key aspects of Vim, and had an up-front emphasis on motions that I really liked.
Unfortunately, Jonathan’s site disappeared from the web a while back, and the article along with it. I thought it might’ve just been moved to a new host, but searches against key phrases mostly came up empty. I was able to find an updated email address, however, so I crossed my fingers and sent Jonathan a note:
Hi. Sorry to bother you out of the blue, but I was hoping you could tell me if there’s an official home for your “Efficient Editing With Vim” article.
I can still get the text from archive.org, and I found a couple of copies of it on random websites, but none of them looked like something you control. I’d really like to send people to the right place.
I’m happy to report that Jonathan responded a couple of days later, and kindly offered to rehost the article on Github pages. You can now find it here…
…where it will hopefully live a long and happy life. Thanks, Jonathan!