Johnny Vimseed -- Just sent out the following email to a coworker who expressed interest about using vim and figured it was halfway useful information to anyone who might want to get started (though the only person other than me that I know reads this blog is the guy who finally got me to use vim).

Vim's that text editor I was talking about that I like using, but is a little esoteric when it comes to controls. You might want to check out this pdf:
http://tnerual.eriogerg.free.fr/vimqrc.pdf

That shows most of the commands you need in vim (okay, all that you *need* and tons you probably don't), and also gives you an idea of how crazy things are in there (really not too bad once you get used to it). There's also a pretty good set of help files in the app itself.

You can download vim from this url (it's free):
http://www.vim.org/faq/download.html
([For Windows,] look under "I don't have time to read all this - which files do I need?")

If you have questions, just give me a yell. Ultimately it's sped things up for me and made the mouse pretty useless when I'm editing, but I had a ton of help from a friend while I was learning it.

Good luck, etc.


One other link for complete vim beginners:
Very basic introduction to "vi" (the editor vim "grew out of") at webmonkey.com