I find a large number of people around me who have used vim a few times while writing programs. Very few of them have grown into becoming effective vim users. The majority drop out because of its initially daunting interface. A good number of the interested users switch to emacs, because they think the ‘power’ just isn’t there with vim. I am not saying emacs is bad, but I just cannot stand decisions made on lack of information.
I found the following helpful for cases where you are on a system and want to turn off some very annoying vim settings.
http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=330
Add to personal .vimrc:
set nocindent
set nosmartindent
set noautoindent
filetype indent off
I use this in case a GNU system already has vim that I didn’t remove and already replace with nvi.
Debian have a reference card for the main commands in vim. I think it comes as a pdf. It fits exactly on two sheets of A4, so you can double-side it, laminate it and keep it around – very handy. I’m sure the card doesn’t cover nearly enough ground for the serious user or programmer, but it’s really helpful for lighter stuff: editing config files or dealing with no-X things, like editing a file on another machine over ssh. For quick and simple things, I reckon joe has a lot going for it even though it’s not nearly as powerful. But I find joe’s commands easier to remember for some reason.
This is the original one
http://www.gentoo.org/images/vicheat-compound.png
And this is the most useful one
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/101/292400425_6bba80c95f.jpg?v=0
If your summary is just a quote from the story, can you put quotes around it and possibly also put it in italics? For example, see most of Thom’s news postings.
I’ve been a Vim user for many years now, but since we just got Vim installed on our development server, I shared this intro/tutorial with the rest of my team.
I thought this article was filled with a lot of good tidbits, however one comment was made that made me cringe!
I assume you know how to split windows, and all that jazzy stuff.
This is the one feature that totally expected to be covered. Every time I use vim and the split window feature with someone next to me they are instantly like “WOW! How do you do that?” I think this is one of vims most flexible and underused features that should have been granted space in this article. Especially when insertion and copy/paste functions are covered. I give this article a B+ overall, but come on guy! Cover the split windows.
I agree totally. Splitting windows is one of my “neat” selling points for Vim, to my hard-core vi-user friends. Once they see me split a window horizontally, then resize them, and split the top window vertically, they become totally impressed.
Actually, my best selling point is when I edit multiple files, and show how to move between them, then copy and paste between buffers.
Oh, and we won’t even talk about the syntax highlighting. That’s always good for a few “oooh”‘s and “ah”s.
These are my killing CLI all time favorites.
Wow, so I’m not the only one out there! Personally, I like the mcedit, too, but it’s not as handy when terminal emulation is not very good.
I do most of my editing in VIM, but it looks like I’ve been only scratching the surface here. Thanks for the good article.
I once made an effort to learn vim and emacs because if they are so hard to use, they must be superior right?
But now I only use the basics in vim when I have to and avoid emacs. Coding is done in a real IDE and for other tasks I use editors that are both powerful and usable without reading books and tutorials.
Life is too short for vim.
Learning vi or vim seems to be most useful if you’re on a *nix terminal, since the server is bound to at least have vi (emacs is more resource-heavy). I actually have a used copy of the O’Reilly vi book, but I don’t use or admin headless servers, so I just use GUI text editors.
I really like Vim and used it on small to large scale projects. It has helped me create a video game (in C for Linux PDA), cms system (content mgt in PHP5) and a bunch of other projects.
I also now use Komodo Edit (free ed.) and it’s nice as well. Sometimes a full GUI is nice.
Of course having a background as a Linux/Unix admin. Vi/Vim has served me well (Perl, Shell, Python scripting).
Go Vim!