Vim gives you a language for editing text

Vim it has a language of its own built out of composable commands. Those that speak fluent Vim can precisely describe the action they want to carry out on their text.

We’re not going to explore the details of the command language just yet, but these are the kinds of things you can tell Vim to do:

• “Delete this sentence”
• “Sort this range of lines lexicographically, removing any duplicates”
• “Change the text from my current cursor position until the next instance of foo”
• “Make everything in these quotation marks uppercase”

In other editors, these kinds of actions (if they are even possible) are usually mapped to a chorded single key command that you have to remember — something like ‘ctrl+shift+a’. These are hard to remember, and can sometimes be hard to type. The beauty of Vim is that, once you know the core language, you can describe edits like these without having to learn new, obscure shortcuts.