It is a truth universally acknowledged that one does not simply learn Vim. Vim’s learning curve is notoriously steep, reputedly even vertical. So when a friend started learning it some time ago, I took it upon myself to send her occasional “tips of the day” to ease the ascent. I’m putting them up now in case they’re helpful to others as they get their feet wet with Vim.
There are plenty of really great Vim tutorials out there that I could highly recommend (like this comprehensive one, this interactive one, and this game, among innumerable others). But tutorials alone aren’t enough, as not everyone has the time or the willingness to make it through them, and I suspect based on personal experience that many earnest students of Vim never get started, or lose patience and give up before they hit their stride. In practice, Vim is something that you learn over time in many different ways — sometimes a deep dive, sometimes the guidance of an expert, and sometimes a tip from a friend. This blog series is more on the side of the latter two (without presuming to declare myself an expert!) — bite-sized, progressive tips covering the principles and practice of Vim. These tips aren’t going to teach you Vim; they assume that you are already trying to learn and are referring to resources online. But they might help you organize and solidify concepts as you go along. They may help you develop fluency.
So here they are. There are about a dozen tips, in all, ranging from basic proficiency to more complex or “advanced” usage, all presented in easy-to-digest daily tips. They assume almost no prior knowledge of Vim, and are aimed at users of all “Vimlikes,” whether Vim itself or one of the many clones (such as Emacs’s Evil or Neovim). The tips are mostly independent of one another but are meant to be read in order. For instance, macros come at the end not because they’re difficult but because they’re easy — too easy. I’ll post them all probably over the next couple of weeks.
Enjoy, and good luck! 👍
- Introducing the Nouns
- Writing Things
- Actually Doing Things (Verbs)
- The Truth About Nouns
- Quantifiers
- Search
- Coordinates
- Selecting Things
- Scrolling
- Going Places
- Phrases
- Living the High Life
- Time Travel
- Saying More (Macros)
- Naming Things
- A Mind Forever Vimming (Ex Mode)
- Aggregate Operations
- Bibliography and Next Steps
Other Formats
The series is also available as an ebook in EPUB format. This is an autogenerated version and unfortunately loses code formatting. I might work on a properly formatted version at some point (let me know if you would be interested in having this).
sudhir
i am a big gvim fan. i write vim macros liberally .can i have your email address? i have a lot of queries i want to ask for , which i have tried over years in google and still could not find them
thanks,
sudhir
sid
Hi Sudhir, thanks for stopping by! I would actually just ask on the vim_use mailing list. That’s what I do whenever I have a text-editing task I have no idea how to solve, and I’ve always gotten an answer (usually several!).
Chris
This series is excellent!
sid
🙏
Kovi
Great series.
Could you also publish it as a PDF or epub please?
sid
Hi Kovi, thanks for the suggestion! I haven’t found a great epub option yet but for now I’ve added a print option to the social media icons at the bottom of each post. You should be able to print to PDF from there. What do you think?
UPDATE: Ok, I’ve added an autogenerated EPUB for the series (linked at the bottom of the post above).
Kovi
THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR THE EPUB!!!!
Sorry about the caps. 🙂
sid
Haha, sure thing! 😆