What is the best way to force yourself to master vi? [closed]

A good while ago, I read an article by the creator of viemu, clearing up a lot of the misconceptions about vi, as well as explaining why it's a good idea (and why it's been very popular for the last 30 years+). The same guy also has a great set of graphical cheat sheets that teach the basics a few bits at a time.

I'm convinced.

I've been convinced for the past 2 years in fact. But I still really haven't gotten around to force myself to learn vi as my primary editor, the learning curve is just too high. When I get down to work, acceptable but immediate productivity (using my current editor) has so far won over tremendous productivity farther down the line (using vi).

Does anybody have any good tips to help get past the learning curve? It can be straight out tips, some other tutorial or article, whatever.

Edit: Note that I'm aware of the vim/gVim, Cream and MacVim (etc.) variants of vi. I kept my question about vi to refer to the vi family as a whole. Thanks for all the great answers.

Update (April 2009)

I've been using Vim (more precisely, MacVim) in my day to day professional life since last December. I'm not going back :-)

Good luck to everyone in their Vim mastery.

First of all, you may want to pick up Vim; it has a vastly superior feature set along with everything vi has.

That said, it takes discipline to learn. If you have a job and can't afford the productivity hit (without getting fired), I'd suggest taking on a weekend project for the sole purpose of learning the editor. Keep its documentation open as you work, and be disciplined enough not to chicken out. As you learn more, become efficient and start relying on muscle memory, it won't be as hard to stick with it.

I've been using Vim for so long that I don't even think about what keys to press to search or navigate or save. And my hands never leave the keyboard. To use Vim is one of the best choices I've made in my programming career.

The first thing I'd do is lay a piece of paper or a book over your arrow keys and your ins/home/end/pgup/down keys. Those aren't needed in Vi.

Next I'd get used to hitting ctrl+[ whenever you're told to hit escape. It's much faster and you won't need to take your hands off the keyboard.

Then I'd watch my screencasts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcpQ7koECgk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6WCm6z5msk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPDoI7gflxM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1_CfIb-3X4

Then, just practice practice practice.

edit The reason for avoiding the arrow keys is that they slow you down. One of the largest benefits of Vim is the speed it allows you. The arrow keys also prevent you from really embracing the modal nature, which is very powerful when mastered.

Step 0: learn to touch type. Seriously - if your fingers don't know where the keys are then vim is going to be a pain. And even if you reject vim, touch typing will improve your programming (ask Steve Yegge ) by making the mind to monitor link friction free. There is a lot of software that can help you improve your typing.

Step 1: use vimtutor to get you started. It is in gvim (under the help menu I think) or you can just type 'vimtutor' at the command line. It will take 30-45 minutes of your time and then your fingers will know the basics of vi/vim and you should be able to edit files without wanting to hurl your keyboard out of the window.

Step 2: use vim everywhere. See this question for tips and links for using vim and vi key bindings at the command line, from your web browser, for composing emails, in your IDE ... You need to use vim to embed the key bindings in your muscle memory.

Step 3: learn more about vim. You will only have scratched the surface with vimtutor. You can watch this video or read this article (both about the "Seven habits of effective text editing". You can read about tips and tricks on StackOverflow. You can browse vimtips. Learn a litle often would be my advice - there is so much out there that sticking to bite-size chunks will be the best way to make the knowledge stick.

Step 4: Profit :)