Vim Anti-Patterns (2012)

The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Deleting text with intent to replace it by entering insert mode immediately afterward isn’t necessary:

It’s quicker and tidier to use for change:

This has the added benefit of making the entire operation repeatable with the command. Vim lets you use the arrow keys to move around in both insert and normal mode, but once you’re used to using to navigate, moving to the arrow keys to move around in text feels clumsy; you should be able to spend the vast majority of a Vim session with your hands firmly centered around home row.

Source: sanctum.geek.nz