I’ve been switching from Vim to Helix recently. I did the built-in tutor, and whenever I need to configure something, I look it up in the docs. The problem is, I only find what I already know to look for. Without reading the documentation more broadly, I don’t really know what I can configure in the first place.
So I’m curious, do you sit down and read documentation to understand a tool, or do you just search it when you hit a specific problem?


If it’s something I will be using a lot and in depth (such as your editor case), it’s worth RTFM. For other stuff just try to find the bit I need. It also depends to some degree how similar it is to other stuff I’ve used before. I may be able to grok a lot of stuff intuitively if it’s similar to stuff I’ve done elsewhere. For instance jumping between versions of Unix was like this.