> Someone interested in $THING would be better off learning $THING directly rather than tip-toeing around it.
This is not really the universal truth that you think it is. I remember when I learned to drive my father started me on his car with a manual transmission. I skipped gears, Started from a stop in 3rd gear, and had a whole lot of frustration trying to deal with both the concepts of driving the car, the rules of the road, and trying not to completely destroy the clutch of the car. I switched to learning on my mother's car, which was an automatic. I gained confidence on the road and then I went back to learning how to drive stick. This resulted in a much easier time for both me and the clutch. So no, I wasn't better off learning it directly. The same can be said for something like walking and then running, or learning how to program. They typically don't start students off learning to write Assembly even if their intent is to be an Assembly programmer. Training wheels on a bike exist for the same reason too. Can people make this approach work? Sure, but that doesn't mean it's better. In fact I think in quite a lot of cases it's way worse.
> they get very frustrated by the real Vim
They are using the "real" Vim. You being weirdly gatekeepy about this doesn't change the fact that they're using the same application that you are, except they loaded a config different from yours. There is a list of different keybinds from vanilla vim in their documentation and you can disable them with one line in your config. Pretty much all the typical vim paradigms are exactly the same.
> they try to replicate their previous ready-made config anyway.
kind of their prerogative and one of the nice things about extensible programs like vim is that people can do exactly that. I could change vim to use CUA commands, be mouse-focused, and default to insert mode and I'd still be using vim.
> This is not really the universal truth that you think it is.
All of those examples are about prerequisites, though. You learned to use manual transmission in a car with a manual transmission, not in a car with an automatic transmission. You learned to drive a car in a car, not on the back of a horse. The person who learned Assembly learned it by doing Assembly. Etc.
> They are using the "real" Vim.
They are shielding themselves from "real" Vim.
> You being weirdly gatekeepy about this doesn't change the fact that they're using the same application that you are, except they loaded a config different from yours.
The config they use not only hides Vim behind dozens of plugins but also adds a few new concepts to the mix that they are forced to learn _on top_ of Vim's ones. What a waste.
Training wheels aren't a prerequisite for learning to ride a bike and they're not typically separate thing from a bike. They're bolted onto a bike and then removed when they're no longer necessary. I learned how to drive a car in an automatic, I learned how to use a stick shift in a manual car. Pretending like a car with a manual transmission or an automatic transmission as completely different concepts is disingenuous. There are skills transferrable between learning the two, otherwise known as learning how to drive a car. Similarly, if I wanted to learn to drive a large semi, knowing how to drive a car has transferrable skills.
> They are shielding themselves from "real" Vim.
Define "real" vim.
> The config they use not only hides Vim behind dozens of plugins but also adds a few new concepts to the mix that they are forced to learn _on top_ of Vim's ones. What a waste.
It doesn't hide Vim behind anything. Extensibility is baked into Vim and a great deal of effort has been put into ensuring that it can be extended to suit people's needs. One of the largest changes in Vim 9 was working on increasing the capabilities and speed of Vim9 script. Whether someone writes their own config, doesn't use one, or uses a premade configuration like SpaceVim, they're still using Vim.
They trade time learning SpaceVim's paradigms in exchange for not having to configure vim themselves which means they can spend more time learning how to use Vim for getting work done rather than faffing about with plugins and designing their own keybinding schemes. If SpaceVim completely eschewed Vim paradigms for its own you might have a point but that's not the case. It very much adheres largely to how Vim itself works while making it easier for someone to get up and programming.
This is not really the universal truth that you think it is. I remember when I learned to drive my father started me on his car with a manual transmission. I skipped gears, Started from a stop in 3rd gear, and had a whole lot of frustration trying to deal with both the concepts of driving the car, the rules of the road, and trying not to completely destroy the clutch of the car. I switched to learning on my mother's car, which was an automatic. I gained confidence on the road and then I went back to learning how to drive stick. This resulted in a much easier time for both me and the clutch. So no, I wasn't better off learning it directly. The same can be said for something like walking and then running, or learning how to program. They typically don't start students off learning to write Assembly even if their intent is to be an Assembly programmer. Training wheels on a bike exist for the same reason too. Can people make this approach work? Sure, but that doesn't mean it's better. In fact I think in quite a lot of cases it's way worse.
> they get very frustrated by the real Vim
They are using the "real" Vim. You being weirdly gatekeepy about this doesn't change the fact that they're using the same application that you are, except they loaded a config different from yours. There is a list of different keybinds from vanilla vim in their documentation and you can disable them with one line in your config. Pretty much all the typical vim paradigms are exactly the same.
> they try to replicate their previous ready-made config anyway.
kind of their prerogative and one of the nice things about extensible programs like vim is that people can do exactly that. I could change vim to use CUA commands, be mouse-focused, and default to insert mode and I'd still be using vim.