Like others have mentioned vimtutor is a good place to start, there are several other resources available to you for improving on your knowledge & understanding of the vim philosophy, which needless to say is not only brilliant but surprisingly & pleasantly intuitive.

However I would still like to use an example to draw a parallel to how one should approach learning vim.

As we are born, we are pretty much immobile, we need to be carried to wherever we need to go, slowly our legs & arms develop muscles and gradually with practice we learn both how to use them & control them precisely to make use of them to start crawling so we can explore our surrounds ourselves. As we grow further and develop more muscles, strength & coordination we start to walk and with some more of the same we eventually are able to run. Now you might think this would be the end of it but it isn't, after we're fairly comfortable walking / running to wherever we desire, we feel the need to go farther and farther and realise the need for more tools (different vehicles) to go farther and faster.

Learning vim IMO should be similar to that, in that you should learn enough that you can allow for your mind to grasp quickly and with practice it would seep into your muscle memory and become second nature, that would the time for you to learn further more tricks and repeat the cycle.

After spending enough time & effort in understanding & making vim philosophy so that it's in your muscle memory you will left frustrated at how painfully slow & awful it is to use other applications & editors that don't have some support for mimicking vim.

Like others have mentioned vimtutor is a good place to start, there are several other resources available to you for improving on your knowledge & understanding of the vim philosophy, which needless to say is not only brilliant but surprisingly & pleasantly intuitive.

However I would still like to use an example to draw a parallel to how one should approach learning vim.

As we are born, we are pretty much immobile, we need to be carried to wherever we need to go, slowly our legs & arms develop muscles and gradually with practice we learn both how to use them & control them precisely to make use of them to start crawling so we can explore our surroundings ourselves. As we grow further and develop more muscles, strength & coordination we start to walk and with some more of the same we eventually are able to run. Now you might think this would be the end of it but it isn't, after we're fairly comfortable walking / running to wherever we desire, we feel the need to go farther and farther and realise the need for more tools (different vehicles) to go farther and faster.

Learning vim IMO should be similar to that, in that you should learn the basics first and then gradually and incrementally keep learning more advanced patterns, ideas, plugins to keep improving your workflow. With practice everything you learn would get embedded in your muscle memory and become second nature and that would the time for you to learn further more tricks and repeat this cycle. Since VIM is still under development and adding new features (there's also NeoVIM), this process can go on forever.

After a certain point, when VIM's philosophy has embedded deep in your muscle memory you will stop spending time thinking about how to do what you want and be completely focused on what you really want to do. When that happens you will be feel frustrated at how painfully slow and awful it is to edit text in other applications / editors that do not have some decent support for emulating vim.

Like others have mentioned vimtutor is a good place to start, there are several other resources available to you for improving on your knowledge & understanding of the vim philosophy, which needless to say is not only brilliant but surprisingly & pleasantly intuitive.

However I would still like to use an example to draw a parallel to how one should approach learning vim.

As we are born, we are pretty much immobile, we need to be carried to wherever we need to go, slowly our legs & arms develop muscles and gradually with practice we learn both how to use them & control them precisely to make use of them to start crawling so we can explore our surrounds ourselves. As we grow further and develop more muscles, strength & coordination we start to walk and with some more of the same we eventually are able to run. Now you might think this would be the end of it but it isn't, after we're fairly comfortable walking / running to wherever we desire, we feel the need to go farther and farther and realise the need for more tools (different vehicles) to go farther and faster.

 

Learning vim IMO should be similar to that, in that you should learn enough that you can allow for your mind to grasp quickly and with practice it would seep into your muscle memory and become second nature, that would the time for you to learn further more tricks and repeat the cycle.

After spending enough time & effort in understanding & making vim philosophy so that it's in your muscle memory you will left frustrated at how painfully slow & awful it is to use other applications & editors that don't have some support for mimicking vim.

Like others have mentioned vimtutor is a good place to start, there are several other resources available to you for improving on your knowledge & understanding of the vim philosophy, which needless to say is not only brilliant but surprisingly & pleasantly intuitive.

However I would still like to use an example to draw a parallel to how one should approach learning vim.

As we are born, we are pretty much immobile, we need to be carried to wherever we need to go, slowly our legs & arms develop muscles and gradually with practice we learn both how to use them & control them precisely to make use of them to start crawling so we can explore our surrounds ourselves. As we grow further and develop more muscles, strength & coordination we start to walk and with some more of the same we eventually are able to run. Now you might think this would be the end of it but it isn't, after we're fairly comfortable walking / running to wherever we desire, we feel the need to go farther and farther and realise the need for more tools (different vehicles) to go farther and faster.

Learning vim IMO should be similar to that, in that you should learn enough that you can allow for your mind to grasp quickly and with practice it would seep into your muscle memory and become second nature, that would the time for you to learn further more tricks and repeat the cycle.

After spending enough time & effort in understanding & making vim philosophy so that it's in your muscle memory you will left frustrated at how painfully slow & awful it is to use other applications & editors that don't have some support for mimicking vim.