Best of Vim Tips

http://rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html

by adulau • 14 years ago

273 26 14 years ago

rayninfo.co.uk

ljs• 14 years ago

This has been my primary means of learning vim.

Most of the web resources I've learnt from have been verbose and gradually introduced new ideas (i.e. the advanced bash scripting guide, or any of Steve's rants).

I've been hooked on OP for it's terseness and challenging obscurity; which I guess suits the subject matter.

clay• 14 years ago

An awesome way to learn new tricks is to hack with another vim user

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Or vim golf if there are no users nearby.

BasDirks• 14 years ago

I find that terse resources like this (and for example Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python[1]) are the best learning resources. A true goldmine.

[1] http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...

aoe• 14 years ago

Agreed. But this page could certainly make use of some whitespace, to be more readable.

phatbyte• 14 years ago

Agreed as well

ryanbraganza• 14 years ago

The PDF linked at the bottom is a little more palatable.

http://gav.brokentrain.net/projects/vimtips/vimtips.pdf

Toenex• 14 years ago

Page is best viewed in VIM.

dudus• 14 years ago

I believe this is the worst Vim Tips compilation I have ever seen. Utterly complicated commands with no real life examples. Also doesn't explain the difference between commands, motion commands and selectors. Which are crucial to the starter Vim user.

If you are an experienced Vim user, this might be a handy cheat sheet. If you're new to Vim, go look somewhere else.

vdoma• 14 years ago

Most of these are very useful and definitely real-world examples. I agree it's not for total beginners, but the page never makes such a claim.

secoif• 14 years ago

I think the parent was asking for real world usage examples over contrived tom/dick/harry examples.

mmorey• 14 years ago

Can you provide a link to something better? As a novice VIM user I can't get enough of these resources.

telemachos• 14 years ago

A bunch of things I like, in no particular order.

Vimcasts: http://vimcasts.org/ (And keep your eye out for Drew's forthcoming book: Practical Vim.)

Vim University: http://vimuniversity.com/

Coming Home To Vim: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

Efficient Editing With Vim: http://robertames.com/files/vim-editing.html

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?: http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/26702

Vim anti-patterns: http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/tag/anti-patterns/

gnosis3• 14 years ago

Beginners should really start with vimtutor (just type "vimtutor" in your shell), and go through it a couple of times.

This is also useful:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

And when you're done with those, come to #vim on freenode. You can learn a hell of a lot about vim by just idling there. Of course, you'll learn even faster by asking questions.

gnosis3• 14 years ago

Taking each of the tips on this page and expanding on them to make them more suitable for beginners might actually make for pretty good and useful project.

Anyone want to take it up?

pg_bot• 14 years ago

The only thing I have hated about learning vim, is the god awful styling of every resource related to it. Every article or piece of documentation is a big wall o' text with no effort put into styling or separating content. This has surprised me since I don't believe that the set of competent designers and vim users are mutually exclusive.

swah• 14 years ago

I feel like that about Java.

gnosis3• 14 years ago

Maybe you haven't seen this:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

This cheat sheet is horrible. Subjectively and objectively:

* Bold fonts everywhere without enough vertical space: bold is for important stuff, not for copy text and the lack of vertical spacing makes the whole thing hard to parse.

* Keychars centered vertically instead of placed on a common baseline.

* Meanings of keys centered horizontally: considered very hard to read since forever.

* No explanation for `WORD`: is it for uppercase words? (yes, I know the answer)

* Instead of being logically grouped, the commands and motions are tied to the spatial location of their key: the logic and grammar behind most of Vim is hidden in profit of an opaque, maximalist and almost unreadable mess.

* Focus is put on raw memory instead of intelligence and acquiring instant exhaustive knowledge instead of learning naturally.

* QWERTY is only one of many keyboard layout standards: a lot of the keys represented here are located elsewhere in french AZERTY or other layouts. This has one important consequence: the physical location of the keys bound to each command/motion is not linked at all to the name of the command or its mnemonic or to anything relevant. Because `A` can be anywhere, learning the physical location of "Append at eol" on this specific keyboard layout or on any other makes no sense at all.

But we obviously don't all learn the same way.

Hemospectrum• 14 years ago

Whenever someone mentions that they want to learn Vim, I send them this tutorial. It's the only one none of them have ever complained about. And from first-hand experience it's as useful for intermediate users as it is for beginners.

zeekay• 14 years ago

I found this is an attractive and well thought-out resource for understanding vim motions: http://naleid.com/blog/2010/10/04/vim-movement-shortcuts-wal....

gosub• 14 years ago

I think that the best way to learn vim is the understanding that, more than a text editor, it is a text editing language, derived from vi and ex. It has commands (d,c,y) and parameters for the commands (1,2,3..., f,t, a, i, /regex/). It also has means of abstractions (macros, .vimrc) and variables (registers). It's like a touch-typing dsl for text editing. This is one of the best explanations of this that I've found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

ralph• 14 years ago

This is something to skim and spot bits you didn’t know, leading you to the relevant bit of the fine manual. It has errors though, e.g.

    /\<\d\d\d\d\>   : Search for exactly 4 digit numbers
    /\D\d\d\d\d\D   : Search for exactly 4 digit numbers
    /\<\d\{4}\>     : same thing

The middle one is not the same as the other two since \D has to match something unlike the zero-width assertions of \< and \> for beginning and end of word.

tambourine_man• 14 years ago

I don't know how many times I've hit this link from random googling.

Just like this sed one liners: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html

ramblerman• 14 years ago

very nice, what I particularly liked was :

d/fred/ :delete until fred

y/fred/ :yank until fred

c/fred/e : change untill fred

I actually prefer this over ctf, dtf as it scales better

Best of Vim Tips

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