I've been trying to get better at vim on the grounds that I spend a bunch of time in it and even without caring about 'vim golf' there are a number of things about it that would save me time and effort. For now, my focus is on some additional movement commands and I'm primarily interested in text editing, not code (I do relatively little coding in vim for various reasons, but a lot of writing everything from documentation through email to Wandering Thoughts posts).

I already know a certain amount of the basic movement commands (or at least what I think of as basic movement commands), so I'm mining promising looking additional movement commands from the official documentation and other sources (including helpful comments here). In no particular order:

{ }	I already use } a lot as part of reflowing paragraphs with fmt and other tools, but for various reasons I don't currently use these much for pure movement. (Partly this is because I don't entirely like how they put the cursor on the blank line between paragraphs, which is petty of me.)
W	This uses a definition of 'word' that's usually more how I think about words in text. I should make use of it both for movement and for deletion and changes.
( )	I often work on things with sentences so by-sentence movement should be useful.
b B	Backing up by words is faster than by characters. Of course backing up by sentences is even faster.
e E	Moving forward to the end of a word instead of the start is convenient for setting up edits.
f	I'm most likely to use this inclusive version of t when editing a text run, because often I'm editing up to and including its closing character.
F T	These are questionable; I want to say I have real uses for going backwards to characters, but I'm not sure I do. They also only operate on the current line, making them less useful for large jumps (but more controllable for edits).

I'm not sure if I have much use for the a[Ww] and i[Ww] text object selectors. They sound cool in the abstract but I believe that most of the time I'm modifying text I'm at the start (or end) of the word I want to cover. At least right now my gut feels that it's not worth trying to remember, use, and practice them on top of the others in this list.

(An honorable mention goes to # and *, find previous/next occurrence of the word under the cursor. They sound neat and I sort of think I have uses for them, but probably not really.)

I should also probably focus purely on W, B, and E, which means not even trying to practice b and e. I already know w, so that's sticking around, but I should try to use it less. Of course, the w, b, and e versions are tempting since they're slightly easier as lower case and almost always do what I want.

(I have no interest in shifting my text reflowing reflexes to use vim's native gq operation. !}fmt is such a reflex by now that I actively have to think about what the sequence actually is, and it's more flexible in various ways for me. In theory I should probably think about using !apfmt to not have to jump to the start of the paragraph first, but I'm not sure I like it or want to try to remember it now. It also has the side effect of moving my cursor position to the start of the paragraph.)

The other bit of vim that I should use more actively than I do right now is deleting and pasting words to move them around in my text. For no particularly great reason, I always think about vim's deletion and pasting as being line-based, while in at least modern vim it's perfectly capable of being used to shuffle phrases around within a line and the like. It's possible that moving to a less line-oriented view of moving text around could make the as text object more useful to me, if I want to use it as part of re-ordering or deleting sentences.

If I'm using these new motion operations to select text ranges for editing operations instead of moving around, I might want to use v to enter visual (selection) mode. This would give me the chance to see exactly what I'm selecting before I fire off an editing operation on it, which might increase my confidence and make me more likely to use these new things.

PS: this article has an interesting wallpaper of a bunch of movement commands.

Sidebar: Window commands I want to remember

The quick reference is here, the longer reference here. I read all of this once and parts of it failed to stick, so hopefully I can do better this time around.

Ctrl-W j/k	Move to window up/down (also the cursor keys)
:split <file>	Split window to a new file
Ctrl-W c	Close current window
Ctrl-W o	Current window becomes only window
Ctrl-W s	Split window
Ctrl-W +/-	Increase/decrease current window size.

:q will quit editing a file and close the current window on it, but :qall is what I really want at the end of a multi-file editing session because it closes everything down at once.

(Windows and multi-file operations are one of my big vim blind spots and thus one area where more mastery could really help.)