Vim Intro

Table of Contents

Work in Progress.

Why Vim

Vim is not a necessity by any means. But in the long run it will make you more productive and save you from having to reach for the mouse as often. Vim won't enable you to type any faster, but it will allow you to navigate and edit your documents more quickly. Once you start using vim it will become second nature and you will want to use it everywhere. Don't worry other people have had that thought too! You can find all sorts of extensions for programs that incorporate vi/vim key bindings, here are just a few:

Program Plugin
Visual Studio VsVim
Visual Studio Code VsCodeVim
Emacs evil, spacemacs
Sublime Vintageous
Chrome Vimium
Jetbrains Editors IdeaVim

Installing Vim

Vim Download

Windows

There are many different ways to install vim. My preferred way is to use chocolately and tux vim. But you may prefer to check vim's site for other ways to download it.

Chocolatey

Chocolatey is a windows package manager. We are going to use it to install vim. Follow the instructions here on how to install it first. Or simply run the following command from cmd.exe. 


@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

Unix

Many Unix distributions will have vim installed already. The vim site recommends installing the latest version by compiling the source yourself. 

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim/src
make

You can also check here for other ways of getting newer versions of vim.

Vim Docs

RTFM

:help or just :h. You can also specify what you want help with. For instance, you can get help with the help command :h help.

Modal Editing

Part of the power of vim lies in the different modes that allows you to assign different purposes to keys whilst in that mode.

  • Normal mode
    • This is where you will spend most of your time.
  • Insert mode
    • This is your normal editing where you would input the text.
  • Visual mode
    • This allows you you to visually select portions of text.
  • Command line mode
    • call functions
    • issue ex commands
    • invoke the shell with !
    • change settings
  • Ex mode
    • Similar to command line mode, but optimized for batch processing.
    • practical uses
  • Select mode
    • I don't know what this is, I just found out about it while making this list.

TODO Normal Mode

topics to cover:

  • the dot operator
  • macros
  • movements (motions)

Motion

these can be used with other commands like yank and delete

key description
h left
j down
k up
l right
w forward word
W forward WORD
b beginning of word
B beginning of WORD
e end of word
E end of WORD
ge end of prev word
gE end of prev WORD
gg first line
G last line
[count]G go to line [count]
/{term} search forward {term}
?{term} search backwards {term}
n next search result
N prev search result
f{char} find {char} to right on line and place cursor on {char}
F{char} find {char} to left on line and place cursor on {char}
t{char} find {char} to right on line and place cursor before {char}
T{char} find {char} to left on line and place cursor after {char}
; next f/F/t/T
, prev f/F/t/T

non motion command movement

key description
ctrl d scroll window down
ctrl u scroll window up
ctrl o go to last cursor position in jump list.
ctrl i Go to newer cursor position in jump list
gf go to file, edit file name under the cursor

Insert Mode

Most of the time you will only want to be typing text directly in this mode. There are shortcuts that you can use, but most of the time you will want to use normal mode to do any modifications to the text. Vim does offer some built in completion functionality but I find that plugin replacements work better.

There are also a number of shortcuts available for insert mode. However, I never use them, and will drop back into normal mode to perform most actions.

Visual Mode

Visual mode is where you can highlight text.

key description
v visual mode
shift v visual line mode
ctrl v visual block mode

This can be useful for when you are unsure about what you want to select or for performing a command line mode action on only a section of text.

By selecting text and then pressing : you can enter command line mode and perform an action such as search and replace.

Visual block mode can be useful for making edits vertically. In this example after making my first selection with ctrl v I use I to add a character before the selection and the use esc to exit and finalize the change. For the misspelled word, first I selected the column, then yanked (copied) it with y and then put (pasted) it with p.

TODO Command Line Mode

.vimrc

Making vim your own.

The vimrc file is loaded every time vim is loaded. If you make changes to your vimrc they will not be picked up without you first either sourcing your vimrc or closing and reopening vim. To source your vimrc we will use command line mode by pressing : 

:source ~/.vimrc

but we only need specify the shortest unique sequence of a command 

:so ~/.vimrc

additionally, if we have our vimrc open, we can shorten it further. % is replaced with the current file name. 

:so %

Plugins

Vim Awesome! is a great site to find awesome plugins.

Plugin Managers

I personally use plug, but I'm sure the others are fine alternatives.

Plug

To install plug on windows run the following in PowerShell. 

md ~\vimfiles\autoload
$uri = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'
(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(
    $uri,
    $ExecutionContext.SessionState.Path.GetUnresolvedProviderPathFromPSPath(
        "~\vimfiles\autoload\plug.vim"
    )
)

To install plug on Unix run the following: 

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
     https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

TODO Vim Script

TODO Bang

Using the command line from within vim. Also now we have :term.

TODO Give examples of use cases.

Links