Yes, I get it: some hackers of lore kept adding magic commands to the unix line editor until it grew into a stand-alone editor. Still doesn't appeal to me. Too many arcane keystrokes to do simple edits.
Simple edits require understanding 'i' to get into insert mode, 'v' to start selecting text, 'esc' to get out of either, 'y' to copy, 'd' to cut, 'p' to paste. Type ":wq" to save and exit.
All of those things are standard in all mac apps, except vim of course.
It occurs to me (just now, so this might be a poorly thought out point), that vim (and emacs) can be viewed as the 'anti-unix'. Unix is designed around tools that fit together in a coherent manner. vim and emacs are huge worlds, uniquely designed to be nothing like anything else.
If you install MacVim all those standard things (except maybe find, but if you know how to use grep you know how to use find in vi (and if you don't then I can't really help you -- every programmer should know how to use grep, period)) are included in the menus to help you get acclimated.
As for design, Vi is a perfect example of Unix design. It's a text editor. It does one thing and it does it well: edit text. Some may disagree but I also think that Emacs is a good example of Unix design. It does one thing (interpret elisp) and it does it well. By the way, at it's core Emacs is an emacs lisp interpreter, not a text editor (despite misconceptions).
> By the way, at it's core Emacs is an emacs lisp interpreter, not a text editor (despite misconceptions).
While this is very true, it should also be mentioned that Elisp is a lisp designed for writing text editing tools.
(Die-hard lispers will cry blasphemy here; I realize that you could get the same effect in $lisp with a proper set of macros. I maintain that the distinction is not relevant as lisp blurs language and library).
tl;dr - Vim's GUI features are different (arguably better) than your Windows-ey conventions. If you want to get started with your "old" key shortcuts, get started with "evim" that ships with Vim.
Cut, copy and paste work a bit differently in Vim. There's a whole lot of clipboards (called "registers") in Vim, some of which have a special purpose. This is a very powerful feature but it doesn't work like the rest of your apps do so it may be misleading at first.
Find and replace is another feature that's not so easy to get started with in Vim, but, again, it can do regex matches and a whole lot more than your regular text editor can.
Vim has also got a neat undo feature, which actually stores a tree-like history.
New document, save, print and others can easily be found in just about any Vim GUI.
If you want a smooth start with Vim without having to learn everything again, you can use evim (bundled with default Vim) that uses all these Windows-ey "default" keybindings.
It's also worth mentioning that most of Vim's keybindings are default keybindings in Unix since the dawn of man (before Ctrl-S was ever used for saving anything). E.g. j and k for scrolling up and down, / and ? for searching, etc. For example they work with the "less" pager in Unix.
All those features are in Vim. Unless your complaint is that the keystrokes are different from what you're used to on the Mac, in which case you should try googling "mac vim": http://code.google.com/p/macvim/
Certainly they are all in vim, I wouldn't suggest it can't do all those things!
But, I have to use lots of programs every day, and my "muscle memory" allows me to get a lot of consistent functionality out of all the programs I use. Whenever I've taken up vim, I've started having trouble with Eclipse/Chrome/TeXShop/etc...
Many people's solutions to this problem seems to be:
1) Use vim for everything or;
2) Make everything use vim shortcuts.
vi's goal is not to simplify the simple tasks, but instead to complicate them to simplify the more complicated ones and allow the really complicated ones to be edited at all.
