I never got into the habit of using { and }. I just use H M L (high/medium/low) to get approximately in the right part of the screen, then go line-by-line. You can also do 5H or 10L to get "5 lines from the top" or "10 lines from the bottom". I make pretty good use of vim features, but I like to mix some sloppiness with the precision. I don't often count things before typing commands, because that breaks the second-nature quality of navigation. If something is more than 2 or 3 objects away, I approximate. I do use counting with t, T, f, and F a lot to hop around, including things like c2f). Very frequently that combines well with spamming j.j.j.j.j. I use . with trivial movement (like j or n) at least 10x more than @a. Another way to move fast sloppily is W and B. I guess I'm saying: learn all the cool stuff you can do, but don't feel like you have to find the most precise way to do every little thing. If you're just starting out, relax and don't try too hard. You can always just pick one new thing every couple weeks and try to add it to your habits.

Oh also: he mentions O to insert above the current line. I use that a lot, but on my systems (going back 15 years or so I think) it has always required a pause, like vim is waiting to see if I'm typing O or some longer command. If I type O and immediately start entering text, strange things happen. This doesn't happen with o. Does anyone else experience this? Maybe it's just something weird in my own setup.

EDIT: Some more "moving fast sloppily": 1G goes to the top of the file. G goes to the bottom. Also you can not-move, but scroll the visible area so that your cursor is on the top line (zENTER), middle line (z.), or bottom line (z-). I use that a lot when I am Ctrl-Fing through a file, so I can see more context.

I have two tricks for better movement, add the following to your .vimrc:

    " for scrolling up and down quickly
    nnoremap J 7j
    nnoremap K 7k
    vnoremap J 7j
    vnoremap K 7k

and the second (which requires a third party plugin):

    " easymotion allows us to jump to all places that could have been reached by
    " (w in this case), and the bd- indicates we want to search backwards too.
    nmap f (easymotion-bd-w)
    vmap f (easymotion-bd-w)

The first one originates from recognizing the problem from the antipatterns article: that spamming j j j j to get down to the line you want is dumb. But I choose not to follow the advice of most vim articles I read which is to learn built-in tricks such as typing 10j or :. The milliseconds it takes for me to count the number of lines I want to go down or assess the line number of the line I'm interested in aren't worth it, I'll just tap j if the line is close enough or J if it is five or more lines down. I think it is a good solution.

The even better solution (and I use them both in tandem) is to install easymotion [1] and use it like I show in the second example.

I also use gg and G to get to leap to the top and bottom of the file quite a lot.

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As to your question about using O to insert above the current line, that should not work that way. Your specific issue sounds very much like a binding has been defined for O. Type :nmap in vim to display a list of bindings and check for lines starting with O. It might be in your .vimrc or some plugin defined something. I would definitely say remove the binding or the plugin rather than put up with that, O is very useful.

[1] https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion