NOTE: This guide has moved to https://github.com/bpierre/switch-to-vim-for-good
This guide is coming from an email I used to send to newcomers to Vim. It is not intended to be a complete guide, it is about how I switched myself.
My decision to switch to Vim has been made a long time ago. Coming from TextMate 1, I wanted to learn an editor that is Open Source (so I don’t lose my time learning a tool that can be killed), cross platform (so I can use it everywhere), and powerful enough (so I won’t regret TextMate). For these reasons, Vim has always been the editor I wanted to learn, but it took me several years before I did it in a way that works for me. I tried to switch progressively, using the Janus Vim distribution for a few months, then got back to using TextMate 2 for a time, waiting for the next attempt… here is what finally worked for me.
Original gist with comments: https://gist.github.com/bpierre/0a0025d348b6001394e0