Not Vim? WTF?

Students will take whatever shortcut they can to be done with it as easily as possible.

Easy, but then people will throw up their hands and say,“That’s not easy, how the fuck am I supposed to know that?”

pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endeast output output.pdf

You know that through man pages, tdlr or whatever. Then if you find yourself doing it a lot, you make a tiny script that makes the process something like

pdfr <input> <optional output>