I actually disagree. I found what finally led to me using VIM was enabling VIM keybindings in RStudio. It's an emulated VIM setup, so not every command is supported, but it does have the advantage that at any point Insert mode works pretty much exactly like a non-vim setup. After a few months of this sort of semi-usage, I started to feel confident enough to use regular VIM, and started looking into more advanced command usage. The biggest thing was still, the ability to drop into Insert mode and have things like selection, copy/paste, backspace behavior, all work like they would in a normal text editor. If I got frustrated and needed to "just get something done", I didn't have to drop into notepad or whatever to do that. Rather than start off with no vimrc, I think its a lot more helpful to start with a vimrc that disables a bunch of functionality or makes it work "normally", which you can then re-enable as you see the need. For example, at first I shortcutted all registers to the system register.