VIM with only lua, or, since regexps are weird in lua, guile, or heck, even a fast ECMAscript but garrenteed to be the same on all platforms would be great...
I've pondered the idea of a "VIM redux" project, not being backwards compatible, but throwing out old cruft, such as vimscript, "embed all the languages but unequally so you can never tell what plugins a system will support!", vi-compatible default mode, and put on some different defaults like syntax highlighting, etc.
I don't think I'll ever like vimscript... so maybe I should buy the book. :-)
A set of crazy tips that made me learn to love the g commands: http://www.rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html
I believe I went to that from http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki, which isn't as fun to navigate as I would like it to be.
If you want to actually learn vim, ditch janus and all the plugins when you start. Start by going to a shell and typing 'vimtutor'. That will get you started. Then build your own ~/.vimrc by scratch by adding some useful options such as:
set number
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on
For other options, you can search around the internet, particularily other people's dotfiles and see what they put in their own vimrc and you can freely take if you like what you see.
and then you can experiment with plugins. You will gain a much better understanding of how they work, what they do and you will be proud of yourself because it's your own personal vimrc and you know every single line that is in it.
For myself, I knew core-vim pretty well, and was coming back to it after taking textmate and sublime text for a spin. Janus was a fast way to bolt on the IDE-alikes I liked from ST2. It was, indeed, too much on a first go, and I uninstalled it. I am back to it, though, and appreciate that it brought together the "big guns" like fugitive, nerdtree, syntastic, &c. as well as things I'm not sure I would have found, like Tim Pope's excellent unimpaired plugin.
Doing things like vimtutor is great for a newbie, but I don't think I care as much whether they have Janus installed or not while they do it.
btw i disagree with you a bit. The best resource to learn vimscript is the sources of popular vimscript plugins.
The next best thing is steve's book, which is brilliant.
Outside of that, http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-n... has a nice explanation of the editing worldview, which ties in with Steve's quote in http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/16.ht..., "The idea of operators and movements is one of the most important concepts in Vim, and it's one of the biggest reasons Vim is so efficient. We're going to practice defining new motions a bit more, because extending this powerful idea makes Vim even more powerful."
Check out http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most..., and maybe http://vimcasts.org/episodes/archive?
I've been using it for about a decade, so I think I've lost the beginner's mind to evaluate whether these are really the right entry points. Lots of people are passionate about vim, though; some googling should find you the exercises that will help you the most.
