I've tried several times in the past year so I had a bit of priming on the basics. That certainly helped. When I first tried it with vscode I was baffled as to why the extension overwrote "ctrl"+"c"/"v"/"x" by default with no explanation. There is a setting to toggle this waaay at the bottom of the extension's settings The breakthrough (or straw that broke the camel's back) was to use the settings-sync extension between vscode-insiders and vscode. that way I could use vscode and vscode+vim on the same workspace. If I came to a keybinding hitch that I didn't want to solve in the moment, then I could switch right over to the other window. This also meant that I could track the evolution of my settings using version control :D... Most importantly, there was no more fear that vim would break my concentration and burn up mental energy at inopportune moments. After a couple of days of ironing out kinks (including adding a .vimrc with "imap jj ") I started to see net improvements in my editing efficiency. now I'm just using one of the standard vim cheat-sheets to gradually introduce new skills.