Although vim is now my most regularly used editor (and it really is vim, not vi), I still have lots to learn about it. Thus, every so often I wind up reading guides to Vim, which often label themselves as being for 'beginning users' or 'intermediate users' or 'advanced users'. One of the interesting things in reading these guides is hitting features labeled as basic that I don't know, or features labeled as advanced that I consider perfectly routine.

(My most recent reading is this one, which I haven't even finished yet.)

For some features that are sometimes considered advanced, like address ranges, I think a lot of this has to do with the path I took through various editors on the way to today. For instance, I've seriously used a version of Unix ed, and it's hard to use ed without getting a fairly thorough exposure to address ranges. This was reinforced by both sysadmin use of sed and my long running fondness for the sam editor. Use of ed and then sam left me completely comfortable with the idea of doing editor operations as (Ex) commands.

(I don't know if marks are generally considered an advanced concept, but as a sysadmin who uses less a lot and jumps around in various sorts of files to find things, marks are very familiar to me and I use them all the time. Sam has the idea of a mark but only a single one, which is easier to keep track of, and it's been so long since I seriously used ed that I can't remember if I really used marks in it.)

When I run into basic vim features that I don't know or haven't mastered, I generally remind myself that I basically drifted into vim instead of actively learning it (including vi). I did at one point long ago read through what was then the vi tutorial, but I did it in another editor (which didn't help get it to stick). This path into vim has left me learning things on a scattershot basis as I stumble over them and decide that they're worth it (not every vim feature is for me).

Part of this is that I use vim primarily as a sysadmin, which is to say that I'm either editing text (such as email) or I'm working with generally small amounts of code, or at least of editing code. My editing sessions tend to be short; I'm definitely not spending all day editing code. If I was, I would probably be more driven to learning vim features that improved that. Plus, right now and likely for the indefinite future, my editor for serious coding is still GNU Emacs for various reasons.

(The pattern of vim things that catches my interest is quite driven by sysadmin interests, from windows while modifying related files at once through mass commenting out references to a machine to changing a bunch of files in the same way at once.)