Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster(vimified.com)

344 points by Silica6149 3 years ago | 253 comments

Hey show HN!

This course came about as a result of wanting a more targeted way of practicing using new vim commands I wanted to pick up, rather than just trying to use them in my regular code editing sessions. When I would try to use new commands during code editing, my productivity took a hit because I was trying to do two different things at once: thinking about code vs practicing my muscle memory.

So, I made a separate environment for practicing, one that had an interactive editor, progress tracking, and achievement goals to let me see which areas I should work on, like speed and efficiency (# of keystrokes). When I realized it would be useful for beginners too, I added lessons to go along with it and this course is the result!

Let me know what you guys think about it :)

xavdid 3 years ago |

This looks very cool, kudos on the launch!

I feel like vim tutorials mostly focus on navigating and editing a single file, which is great! But I mostly struggle with how to replicate opening a whole directory in VSCode, which makes it easy to browse the directory, switch between files, open multiple panels, etc.

I'm almost certain vim does all these things out of the box, but tutorials always end at "this is how you edit some text quickly" and never cover "this is how you do software engineering".

vidyesh 3 years ago | |

I am new to using vim too so NerdTree is a little hard for me to use and navigate and the split windows too are difficult to understand in vim. Not many tutorials or guides or courses cover that well.

So I have the same issue as you, I really like using neovim for smaller projects as its easy to work on them through the shell. But when it comes to big projects I go back to VSCode with the Vim emulator extension as it just makes using the tree much easier for me in VSCode. I have setup custom keybindings and settings to launch the directory when needed or the command palette works great to launch other files. I wish there was a resource to help switch VSCode to neovim while retaining some of the "most" used VSCode features.

bootstrappit 3 years ago | |

That's exactly how I feel too. I just started using neovim a few weeks ago. I'm using `nvim .` to get to a navigable tree, but have no idea if that's the right way to do it.

RMPR 3 years ago | |

You may want to check out Practical Vim by Drew Neil, he covers that aspect.

xavdid 3 years ago | | |

Good to know, thank you! I'll check it out.

seanp2k2 3 years ago |

  :set nu
  / whatever you want to find [return]
  i
  *edit stuff and use arrow keys for nav*
  :wq
  Or :q to quit without saving

That’s all the vim most people need.

The fact that less is installed on many more systems than nano is a testament to the bad assumptions too many devs make about who will be using these systems in the future. And yes, it’s not hard to "apt -y install nano" except at work where we have proxies and internal repos, so now I need to use vim to reconfigure apt sources just so I can use a more normal editor that doesn’t require arcane incantations to perform basic config file editing.

AlchemistCamp 3 years ago | |

This is equivalent to saying hunting and pecking on a keyboard and using only their index fingers to type is "all the typing most people need". Technically, it's true, but it's also sacrificing a lot of productivity that could be gained from a relatively modest one-off investment in learning a skill.

It's also derailing someone's Show HN with a very old and generic online argument.

wruza 3 years ago | |

now I need to use vim to reconfigure apt sources just so I can use a more normal editor

Prepare and paste this into your terminal:

  echo "another line" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Sorry for your pain, but choosing hard ways is a person’s business.

LoveMortuus 3 years ago | | |

I believe the parent was trying to say that the default editor is the hard option, even though easier and intuitive solutions exist.

taskforcegemini 3 years ago | | |

or just "echo 'another line' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

password4321 3 years ago | |

My problem is I can't use the up/down arrows for nav while editing stuff, it just starts spewing control characters on new lines IIRC.

Fuzzwah 3 years ago | | |

This is the reason why I like vim-nox

cheeko1234 3 years ago | |

Nano and commandline is good enough. If apt is available, Micro is even better.

AlchemistCamp 3 years ago | | |

I don't find Nano very productive or very easy on my previously RSI-suffering hands and wrists. VIM is so much better for me along those two dimensions that it's not even much of a comparison.

mikojan 3 years ago | |

Absolutely haram

getcrunk 3 years ago | | |

Is this an Andrew tate reference or just normal Muslim one?

dash2 3 years ago |

I really want to like vim and I love some things about it, like the ability to move chunks about with only the keyboard. But so many things about it kill me. Like, why can't I hit right at the end of a line, and move to the next line? Who thinks that is a good idea? Also, why do I have to have a special mode to insert things? Having to change modes just seems so complex and unintuitive. And why does the help system never tell me what I want?

The frustration is that probably there are fixes for all these things, which if I were an expert I would know. But meanwhile I can use an ordinary visual text editor and I don't have to learn anything new.

CoffeePython 3 years ago |

Congrats on launching :) I built a pretty similar tool last year [1]. This looks like it has some nice improvements over the stuff I did with mine.

Wish I had the time to improve on the course I launched but I ended up starting a company shortly after launching my course and getting into YC.

[1] https://www.vim.so

psyklic 3 years ago | |

This is very kind, saying "pretty similar." The example exercise seems nearly identical!

drodil 3 years ago |

When I was learning vim, I decided to extend the existing vimtutor with some more programming specific tasks. You can find it at https://github.com/drodil/codetutor.vim if you are interested :)

phkahler 3 years ago |

Just type "vimtutor". If you have vim you should also have vimtutor.

wruza 3 years ago | |

Ah, the lost ritual of descending into accompanying manuals. Only a few are able to practice it nowadays.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 years ago | | |

In fairness, a lot of software doesn't come with good documentation built-in anymore, so it's understandable that people would get out of the habit.

MatthiasPortzel 3 years ago |

My pet peeve is Vim tutorials that start with "use hjkl to move around" instead of "use `set mouse=a` to turn on the mouse." In my opinion you need to make sure that you are very clearly disclaiming that you are teaching a harder way of doing things in exchange for incredibly small productivity gains that will be realized years in the future, if ever.

(This is basically a copy-paste of previous comments I’ve made, I haven’t tried your tutorial beyond the first lesson.)

Arisaka1 3 years ago |

I once tried to migrate from VS Code to Neovim. I use TypeScript at work, and use many languages for my side projects.

But the worst part was making Vim provide with things that you'd expect programming editors to have. So many options, what's best is up to opinion, integrating language servers, getting intellisense to work as you would expect, searching the project folder for file names.

Then I realized that all I'm trying to do is make Neovim behave like VS Code with the extra addition of keyboard navigation, which I can get behind. But at my current career level I'd rather spent those 5-10 hours configuring an editor in learning more about <insert whatever language/framework I'm learning>.

I mean, just another Vim introduction when you already have the free options (vimtutor etc.) and FEM's "Vim Fundamentals" won't fix my pains with getting it to work as I'm expecting it to work.

chadcmulligan 3 years ago |

Nicely done. Though I have to say - I gave courses on vi in the 80's but then IDE's and GUI's came along and I moved on. I will never understand why anyone still uses vi in the 21st century, except for occasionally editing a config file on a *nix box.

bityard 3 years ago | |

Oh man, you are going to get a ton of replies on this.

Short version: vim is not vi.

Longer version: I use vim because I am way faster with it than any standard editor. I personally barely customize my vim at all, but there is a large community whose hobby is installing dozens of plugins to turn it into a full IDE and/or making it a highly personalized experience.

steakknife 3 years ago | |

How is it that nobody seems to know that every major editor has either vim mode or a vim plugin. I love vim, but I almost never use it directly. I usually use JetBrains IDE with vim plugin. Best of both worlds.

hyperhopper 3 years ago | | |

I've used a great many editors/IDEs and within a day of installing any vim mode or plugin I find multiple inconsistencies or errors that make my life worse.

Exception being spacemacs/evil, which is why that's the only thing I prefer using over vim

artificialLimbs 3 years ago | |

Normal mode navigation, macros, (mostly because I end up editing a lot of repetitive old code), and marks so far. Using vim for vscode enables me to much more quickly bang out code.

ilrwbwrkhv 3 years ago | |

Neovim is pushing the text editor space like nothing else.

cassepipe 3 years ago |

Learning to remap escape to Caps Lock or to jk or what the Ctrl combination are to switch to normal mode should be the first lesson of all vim courses. This was the biggest cognitive discrepancy for me as a vim beginner : What did you use your smarts to create a modal editor while choosing the worst key ever to switch modes!?

malauxyeux 3 years ago | |

> What did you use your smarts to create a modal editor while choosing the worst key ever to switch modes!?

I believe when vi was originally created, the Esc key was often placed to the left of Q, where the Tab key is now located on QWERTY layouts.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 years ago | | |

Correct; vi was born on this layout: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi). Notice the arrow keys, and Ctrl and escape. In this case, the history of the program basically explains everything in my opinion.

samatman 3 years ago | | |

You could also just press the Alt key on some systems, which sends the control code Esc.

sneak 3 years ago |

*interactive paid course. That should be disclosed above the fold, methinks.

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Definitely try out the free resources for learning vim before ever considering Vimified, or any paid option!

I used vimtutor and openvim to get started, and they're fantastic free resources.

It was only when I couldn't find something to fix my specific problem that I stated in the top comment, did I start building this.

stayux 3 years ago |

I am a designer that got fed up with "mouse" control everywhere.

One day I asked myself: Is there a way to scroll in the browser without using a mouse or arrow keys?. Enter Vimium.:)

I have tried in the past Emacs, but I have an operating system, and I don't need a new one (for now). So now you can take MacVim only from my cold hands. P.S. > You can paste the buffer in insert mode with ctrl+r+0.

stevebmark 3 years ago |

Please just read Practical Vim if you’re going to double down on using Vim. All of these tutorials are the minimal basics. Vim forces you to glue together lots of inefficient commands to manipulate text. I feel frustrated seeing Vim users tout how efficient their editor is when they haven’t learned all of Vim’s nasty bells and whistles you need to actually be efficient at manipulating text. (When you press colon, do you know how to edit the command in Vim mode? No? Read Practical Vim).

bckr 3 years ago | |

I can't really understand whether you recommend Vim itself or not, because of these sentences:

> Vim forces you to glue together lots of inefficient commands to manipulate text

> Vim’s nasty bells and whistles you need to actually be efficient at manipulating text

stevebmark 3 years ago | | |

I’m a power Vim user. I do not recommend it for code editing. Learn it as a curiosity if you want. It’s also handy for quickly editing over SSH. IDEs with multiple cursors are so much nicer than Vim.

QuiiBz 3 years ago |

I wonder why the headline and other gradient title are images. Why not a text with linear-gradient and background-clip?

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Thanks for asking, I initially had them like you suggested but with the way I was doing it, it made it kind of hard to make responsive. For the hero especially, the words didn't line up without lots of adjusting.

I'm not really good at css though, so there's that.

immigrantheart 3 years ago |

I'm a vim user. Over the time I dwindle down my plugins and stick to the basic ones because I often do SSH and don't want my environment to change rapidly.

One thing that I still need though, is proper syntax highlighting. I wish there is an easy way for vim to do it rather than just too many plugins here and there.

JulianWasTaken 3 years ago | |

Do what makes you happy, but just in case you weren't aware, vim supports editing over SSH natively, so there's not really a need to skimp just because you need to edit files remotely, you can use your local machine's setup to edit remote files. The SCP incantation is `vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt`, or see `:h netrw` or various tutorials you'll be able to find.

ronyclau 3 years ago | | |

Two suggestions:

1. Prefer sftp over scp whenever it's available. The scp protocol is pretty obsoleted. Just substitute `scp` with `sftp` in the command.

2. Turn on ssh multiplexing to drastically shorten the wait time when opening a file.

immigrantheart 3 years ago | | |

Ooh I didn’t know this. Thank you.

giansegato 3 years ago |

I see that there's a pretty big miss in the syllabus: surround! yes, true, it's not "official" but rather a plugin, but you can't really do without it, can you?

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

I see, I could add a whole chapter on useful vim plugins! Thanks for the suggestion!

In addition to surround, what other plugins do you think beginners should almost always use?

giansegato 3 years ago | | |

I think surround is so deeply nested in users workflow that it's almost like an official one. It's the only one i'd go as far as to adding it to your course, but potentially you could think of a chapter on vimrc, which skyrockets your productivity (but is also quite advanced)

mastermedo 3 years ago |

I love projects that popularize vim. But I think this one might be in a way too early stage to justify the pricing (assuming those 8 lessons are all there is).

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback! The 8 lessons you mention are actually 8 chapters.

There are actually 34 lessons right now (you can see the lessons if you click on the chapters to expand them).

Please let me know if there are topics that you want to see, I wanna add what people want to learn!

mastermedo 3 years ago | | |

Sorry, I meant 8 chapters. I read through the 34 lessons. I suggest you take a look at typingclub. 700+ lessons free of charge. Repetition, and metrics are the selling point. If you incorporate that model in vimified I think you’ll have way wider adoption.

vogt 3 years ago |

Amazing. I came into programming from a bit of an unorthodox professional background. When I started learning web app development in a serious way, I got blindsided by some of the encounters with vim. In fact it took a long time before I even realized that it was vim I was interfacing with at first. wish I had this back then.

gordon_freeman 3 years ago | |

Mind sharing what professional background you came into programming from? I find such info always interesting.

vogt 3 years ago | | |

A little late to reply but yes I am always happy to talk about this kind of thing. Unfortunately the reality is that my story is not in any way interesting; I didn't start off as a railroad engineer or 2nd grade teacher or anything like that. I started in graphic design in the mid-2000s, got heavily into Web 2.0 and was one of those designers that did skeuomorphic designs delivered in .PSD format with the Lobster font and realistic metal textures and all of that. I've been in UI/UX design sense, and still technically have a role in a design department, but I write code full time. It's an interesting niche to fill and the pool of competent technical designers is growing all the time.

johncoltrane 3 years ago |

> Let me know what you guys think about it :)

Same as the last time you posted it: learning Vim has nothing to do with muscle memory and doing it outside of Vim is pointless. Plus, the "master Vim" claim is dubious given how basic the lessons seem to be.

:help user-manual is easy, built-in, and it goes way beyond this. And it's free.

timwaagh 3 years ago |

I often use vim for editing files but not code. The need to adhere to corporate style pretty much kills it for that.

petepete 3 years ago | |

Is editorconfig any use there? It definitely makes life easier on projects where the contributors have a mix of tools.

https://editorconfig.org/

timwaagh 3 years ago | | |

If I was in the lead perhaps.

quest88 3 years ago |

How does yours compare to shortcutfoo.com?

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Thanks for asking, I actually have practiced vim on shortcutfoo.

It is really good for remembering shortcuts for regular desktop applications, but I felt that it wasn't really meant for learning a code editor like vim.

It did not have an interactive code editor, with the ability to edit lines of code inside of it. In addition, it does not measure progress in terms of speed and # of keystrokes, so you aren't able to see how you could improve. If I recall correctly, it is just meant for remembering the command keystrokes and typing them out (kind of like using flashcards).

Also, as of right now, shortcutfoo is $8 monthly, but it allows access to all shortcut courses.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I used shortcutfoo a few years ago.

Andrew_nenakhov 3 years ago |

So, did it help you finally learn Vim?!

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Yes, in a narrow sense. I would say I know it well enough now to edit code faster than using a regular editor.

It would be difficult for a lot of people to say they've fully learned vim though, since it has a lot of things to discover. Many people who've been using vim for years still find out new tricks. This aspect of vim is appealing, in a way.

LoveMortuus 3 years ago |

vimtutor is pretty good!

Besides that once you learn that you enter edit mode by pressing i - ESC to exit it. :w to save, :q to quit and :q! to force quit / quit without saving. Then you can get by just fine.

You can of course do magic with vim, but that's more in the tinkerer territory~

sy7ar 3 years ago |

IMO one of the best ways to learn vim after the basic movement is to copy others vimrc and build your own using vim. Use :help or :h along the way. vimrc is fairly simple to edit compare to actual programming languages.

ezfe 3 years ago |

Tried to register using my `.dev` email address: "Invalid email"

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Hey, sorry the landing page is a little unclear.

You gain access with the email you use to purchase (the buy button is all the way at the bottom, which I could with improving its location). Thanks for letting me know!

ezfe 3 years ago | | |

Ah, that is not clear. It should say "account not found" at least instead of "invalid email."

sashevuchkov 3 years ago |

It's visually appealing. I really like the web design.

Congrats!

smitty1e 3 years ago |

This looks interesting.

I also paid for https://vimvalley.com/ and am a satisfied customer.

Vlados099 3 years ago |

Hey, I have started using the course yesterday, opened just now and my statistics are gone... Is there a way to report a bug?

imperistan 3 years ago |

I write C# three days a week. Is learning vim worth it?

pluijzer 3 years ago | |

Yes I would say. Most IDE's support vim keybindings via plugins. Vim kingbindings with the convenience of and IDE results in an powerful experience.

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Nope. If you're already comfortable in your code editor of choice and like it, there's no good reason to switch.

However, if you've seen people use it in real life or in youtube videos, and think that it's cool being able to execute precise and fast commands without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, to edit code exactly how you want to, definitely try it!

olalonde 3 years ago | |

If you plan to code for many years, it's definitely worth it. But it has a steep learning curve. It could take you a few weeks before you feel like Vim is not actually slowing you down. But past that point, you will continuously gain productivity and will eventually refuse to use anything else. I've been using Vim for almost a decade and I'm still learning new tricks that boost my productivity.

naillo 3 years ago |

Love it!

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

Thanks! If you wanted any features that are missing, let me know!

loginNSR 3 years ago |

Anything like this for editing in Emacs?

nmz 3 years ago |

This is the wrong way to go, if the UI is so bad it requires a course, then the problem is clearly the tool.

dimensional_dan 3 years ago | |

You're just assuming that one set of optimisations are the most important for everyone in UI design. Good UI design doesn't state that it is always the case that people should be able to use it intuitively. Sometimes enhanced performance, speed, and focus over the long term are optimised over intuitiveness. This is the case for Vim. There is room in the world for both sets of optimisations.

nmz 3 years ago | | |

I do not see how performance, speed and focus are a characteristic of vim. if anything, that's the one thing it lacks.

caseymarquis 3 years ago | |

I take it you're not a musician?

chongli 3 years ago | | |

Or a pilot. Or an artist. Or a mathematician. Or basically anything difficult.

This is the price we pay for having easy-to-use computers. People have developed an expectation that everything should be easy and if it's not easy for beginners then it's bad.

Some things are just hard! That doesn't make them bad. Some of the best things in life actually take years of study to learn.

nmz 3 years ago | | |

Plenty of musicians made it big with easier to use tools many people made fun of. like fruity loops. more intuitive interfaces is not a demerit, it was the point all along.

_qua 3 years ago | |

This is a wild take. I'm not quite sure how you would go about changing it into something "better" without funadmentally destroying its functionality. The "UI" of driving a car or a jet requires "a course" but it doesn't meant that they're bad.

Boltgolt 3 years ago | | |

What a strange comparison. Driving an (automatic) car can be learned through trail and error in no time at all. It's the external factors like other traffic that are hard to get right.

nmz 3 years ago | | |

vis is a step in the right direction, at least in terms of modal editing.

stackbutterflow 3 years ago | |

Good UI is not always optimizing for beginners.

If you're using a tool for 8 hours a day, everyday, for years, you won't be a beginner for very long.

The program must be optimized for the people who are going to use it for thousands of hours. Not for the users who are heard about vim yesterday.

hasperdi 3 years ago | | |

Hard to learn doesn't mean good.

JulianWasTaken 3 years ago | |

I think this is the wrong way to think about computing, though I sympathize, because I also used to think this way until I reflected on a podcast I'd heard about how when the computer mouse was invented, it's little known that a second very sci-fy-y device was also intended to be used as a peripheral, one which you put on your other hand like a glove and moved in all sorts of ways in order to direct your computer. Ultimately this device didn't catch on, but it's not necessarily the case that just because something isn't trivial to start using that it's bad -- on the contrary, both kinds of tools are useful.

Tools which are eminently transparent in how you use them are great to get started, and to continue with if you don't want to spend any more time.

But so are tools which you need to actively invest effort into using. These can unlock ways of using something which are more powerful and rely on the time you put in to learn them -- true for a computer, but there are plenty of other devices in the world where this is the case too.

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

It can also be a boon. One of the things some vim users like is always being able to discover something new, after using it for years.

I'm not really in this camp though, I would prefer vim commands to somehow be more "discoverable".

Much easier said than done, though.

wruza 3 years ago | | |

What were the last three things that you discovered in your editor?

Otek 3 years ago | |

Which code editor does NOT have an online course on how to use it? Go ahead, type "IntelliJ course" or "VS Code tutorial" and see hundreds different videos.

nmz 3 years ago | | |

The problem is how much time do you HAVE to sink into just to learn a tool? If you have a tool with the same functionality and requires less time sink, then the previous tool is obsolete and should be tossed away.

olalonde 3 years ago | |

How do you reconcile that with Vim's massive popularity? Surely, Vim users are aware that there are many "easy to learn" editors.

nmz 3 years ago | | |

I don't, I belittle it whenever I can. but I'm just a stranger on the internet. pay no attention to me.

firechickenbird 3 years ago |

Invalid email

Silica6149 3 years ago | |

On it!

Edit: hmm, can't find any errors. Can you reply with the first 3 letters of your email? You can also contact me via the email located at the bottom of the page.

firechickenbird 3 years ago | | |

got it, need to pay before login

kazinator 3 years ago |

I've been using Vim since 1994, but only this past year have I started getting better at juggling large numbers of buffers. There are three main improvements in how I use Vim compared to before and they are simple.

1. I switched to :autochdir, so that in any buffer, the current working directory is that of the file. Then I dumped :autochdir due to certain annoyances and found a nice way of emulating its good behaviors.

2. I started using sessions to save and recover the states of the buffers. I associate sessions with certain tasks and can return to those tasks quickly.

3. I started using a buffer navigator.

Regarding (1) here is the setup:

  :let $top=getcwd()
  :au BufWinEnter * exec "lcd " . expand('%:h')
  :au BufWinEnter * if expand("%") == "" | exec "lcd $top" | endif
  :au BufWinEnter *.git/* exec "lcd $top"

I know you don't need the colon in your vimrc, but I have it anyway.

The $top variable captures the top level directory on startup; I refer to it in command lines when I need it using $top. Why the dollar sign? Ah, this makes it an environment variable. Vim is much better about interpolating environment variables than other variables; there are more places you can use them thanks to the dollar sigil.

The other three commands above set up a local chdir (lcd) to the directory of the file containing the buffer. The third rule is smart: if we are editing something under .git/ then we go back to the top. This is what autochdir gets wrong. What do we edit under .git? Oh, COMMIT_EDITMSG, for one thing! I want to be in the repository root when editing a commit message.

Regarding 2, here is my setup for working with sessions:

  :nmap + :wa<Bar>exe "mksession! " . v:this_session<CR>
  :command -nargs=1 S exec "mksession! " . expand('$top/') . expand('<args>')

+ becomes a command for saving the current session. Then I have a :S <whatever> command to save a session under a new name, relative to the top directory: the $top variable rears its head.

Regarding 3, there are many buffer navigators. I'm using bufexplorer (version 7.4.32). I make the following tweak to the plugin/bufexplorer.vim file:

  " added before the other maps

  if !hasmapto('BufExplorer') && g:bufExplorerDisableDefaultKeyMapping == 0
      nnoremap <script> <silent> <unique> <Leader>\ :BufExplorer<CR>
  endif

In Vim the "leader key" for hot key commands is backslash by default. Instead of using the default key binding for launching the bufexplorer view, which is like \be or something, I map the backslash key to do that. So just by hitting \\ (backslash twice) I get the buffer explorer.

Mostly I use the LRU view in buffer explorer (most recently used buffer goes to top, pushing others down). Should be called MRU, but everyone who knows memory cache hierarchies understands LRU.

The above three things are very simple, and have a big payoff. I have many more tricks in my vimrc. For instance I use a C program called autotab to analyze a sample of lines from the loaded file and adjust the indentation settings.

mknsri 3 years ago |

I tried out vim for a month or so. I did enjoy using it, although I'm not sure if using vim just feels more productive because you press more keys to do the same thing. However multi-cursor editing and cutting whole lines in modern editors is way more conducive to my workflow and eventually stopped using vim.

Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim? Feature discovery is not one of vims strong suites

EDIT: More specifically by multi-cursor editing I mean selecting multiple occurrences of a word, and then editing in place. For example selecting all occurrences of the word user -> (getUser, setUserId, variable declarations with user) and then replacing them with account. This can be done with vim but is nowhere near as fast, since every change needs to be done one-by-one. Or selecting all the above occurrences, and pasting them somewhere for an interface declaration.

1. In normal mode, place the cursor over the symbol you wish to edit 2. Press key: \* (read: "find the next occurrence of the current symbol and update the search pattern to be that string") 3. Press keys: cgn (read: "change the search match under the cursor") 4. Type the new symbol 5. Press ESC to return to normal mode 6. Press keys: n. (read "find the next occurrence of the search pattern [set in step 2] and repeat the last command [the edit from steps 3-5]") 7. Repeat 6 until all symbols are replaced