Vim Tute

Welcome to Vim Tute!

Learning to use Vim can be difficult, but this tutorial will take you through enough steps to be comfortable using Vim.

Read this tutorial as an online book

What is Vim?

Vim is a text editor that runs inside the terminal.

It stands for Vi IMproved (Vi is another text editor that predates Vim).

It's written as a proper noun ("Vim", and not "vim").

But why bother learning Vim?

1. Availability

Vim is available on most machines.

This is particularly useful when you need to edit / view files in situations where your favourite code editor is not available. Such as:

SSH into a remote server
working inside a Docker container (local / remote)
editing / saving Git commits on a machine where Git is not yet configured to use a code editor

Most of the common operations in Vim will also work in Vi, an older editor that may be the only editor available on some servers.

2. Productivity

Learning to use ONLY the keyboard to write and edit code will vastly increase your productivity.

It is faster and more accurate to select, delete, and manipulate text using keystrokes - than it is to use a mouse/keyboard combination.

Vim also offers a lot of shortcuts that will save you a lot of time. For example:

navigate to the top or bottom of a file with one keystroke combination

record a series of steps that you can replay to manipulate text, such as turning a list of UUIDs

  0015ff92-7f1a-4f22-b34e-3997701ecc94
  001bb00d-fcc0-4a01-bfa7-53dc4f652595
  3c2e1b48-a441-4267-ae5b-df9bd0e8a6d4
  96ca551e-f200-4f7e-8141-d6429a33c4eb
  3ea29c75-02df-4127-9c02-bb8a91821519

into a comma-separated list of quoted UUIDs for use in a SQL query:

  ('0015ff92-7f1a-4f22-b34e-3997701ecc94',
  '001bb00d-fcc0-4a01-bfa7-53dc4f652595',
  '3c2e1b48-a441-4267-ae5b-df9bd0e8a6d4',
  '96ca551e-f200-4f7e-8141-d6429a33c4eb',
  '3ea29c75-02df-4127-9c02-bb8a91821519')

3. Ergonomics

Using only the keyboard will mean that your hands won't need to move to-and-from a trackpad or mouse all the time. You also won't need to waste time locating where the trackpad is, or repositioning your hands on the keyboard after returning from the trackpad.

This all reduces the incidence of repetitive-strain injuries (RSI), and will lead to a much more comfortable coding experience!

4. Curiosity

You probably have come across Vim before - either seeing it being used by a colleague, or spoken about in discussions about editor choices.

You've probably wondered about some questions as: So what exactly is Vim? How on earth do I get started?

By the end of this tutorial you will be able to use Vim fairly comfortably - tick that off your To Do list!

But why another tutorial on Vim?

Yep, there are lots of tutorials out there already - and I learnt so much from reading and following many tutorials and articles.

As I delved deeper into Vim, I took notes from my gleanings and pickings - that's one of the ways I learn new things. I wanted to consolidate my scattered notes into a single repository, and decided to turn it into a tutorial - I hope you find it helpful!