Intro To Vim

Andrew Tomaka

Everyone's First Vim Session

^C^C^X^X^X^XquitqQ!qdammit[esc]qwerty uiopasdfghjkl;:xwhat

Bash.org

But how can we avoid this

• vimtutor - command line tutorial 
• VIM Adventures
• This Cheat Sheet - or many others
• Focus on five commands a week

You will probably still struggle

• Copy and paste
• Not using the mouse
• Getting to the end of the line

Vim has modes

• Such as:
  • normal
  • insert
  • visual
  • command-line
• Higher complexity, but comes with incredible power

You can move around

• The bare minimum
  • h, j, k, l
• Do not use the arrow keys
• Get around the screen faster
  • H, M, L, gg, G, :50

And do things

• i - insert
• d - delete
• y - yank, p - paste
  • Copy and paste - sort of
• c - change
  • like selecting text and typing over it

On objects

• obvious
  • w - word, line
• logical
  • p - paragraph, s - sentence
• useful
  • blocks of all sorts (t-html, various symbols)

That can be modified

• i - inside
• a - around
• t - (un)till
• f - find

And finally combined into a language

• Basic things
  • 3j - down three lines
  • d3j - delete the current and the next three lines
  • d3k - delete the current and the previous three lines
• And more advanced ones
  • c$ - change until the end of the line
  • das - delete around sentence
  • ci" - change inside quotes
  • dit - delete inside html blocks (<b>test</b>)

Demonstration

Other talks

• Write Code Faster: Expert Level Vim by Ben Orenstein
• More Instantly Better Vim by Damian Conway
• Impressive Ruby productivity With Vim and Tmux by Chris Hunt 

Resources

• These Slides
• My vimrc
  • but I recommend starting with a blank

Try Vim for yourself