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.
Artists will do what they do, just for the hell of it. given that art is expression, doing something hard like painting with your toes could be considered art.
The key is simplication, and its something I notice programmers refuse to allow in their profession.
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.
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.
I'm not really in this camp though, I would prefer vim commands to somehow be more "discoverable".
Much easier said than done, though.
- space, k for documentation on the thing under the cursor
- space, [yp] for copying/pasting to the system clipboard
- m, [ai], [acfo] for selecting around/in language structures
This is easy because Helix has a very fast command palette thing, and a lot of its commands are behind consistent prefixes, so if you know `mi(` for selecting within parentheses, you can do `mi` to ask "what other things can I select within?"