You have to make a deliberate attempt to learn it. What i would do is when coding I would focus on a single command and do it 5 or 6 times until it was engrained, then I would go to the next one. I spent about 15 days straight fairly intensively learning vim .. taht was 8 years ago. Best decision I have ever made in my entire programmign career. Now I pick up new vim commands like I am multilingual in 20 languages. All the commands I can usually remember without even typing them, they just stick. It definitely has the rolling snowball momentum effect
At my billing rate "15 days straight" is approximately equal to a low end BMW. So I think tabdo/bufdo will have to do for now. At least until I get a salaried job and can learn the rest at my employer's expense.
I do think there's Pareto principle at play with all this obscure stuff. Knowing 20% gets you 80% of the benefit, every additional percent gets you exponentially smaller fraction of the remaining 20%. That's how I play it anyway. I don't feel like I'm any less productive with my 20%.
It doesn’t take 100% of your time to learn vim. You just work 20% slower while you are intensely learning, then you work back at 100% for a while, then you work at 120% after you have internalized everything.
Oh no, I learn "something new" every day. It's just not related to text editing. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty good at editing in vim. After all, it's been my editor of choice for the last 15 years or so, and I see no reason why it would not remain in that role indefinitely. I'm just not convincing that learning the more obscure stuff is valuable.
Vim is an editing language of actions, contexts, and count, with registers, trees, and buffers. The basic elements are pretty simple but in combination give tremendous power:
