The Vim Beginners’ Site

http://vim.begin-site.org/

by pythonted • 14 years ago

40 14 14 years ago

vim.begin-site.org

keithpeter• 14 years ago

Is this new? Very thin content, and I can't see how you nominate links.

funkiee• 14 years ago

I'd recommend just doing vimtutor every day for a couple of weeks to get some muscle memory in.

gnosis• 14 years ago

I fully agree. vimtutor is just about the best introduction to vim out there.

After mastering it, I recommend hanging out on #vim on freenode. You'll get a great education just from reading the questions/answers others have. And any time you find yourself doing something complex in vim multiple times, ask about it on #vim and you'll probably get some suggestions on how to do it more efficiently.

Another thing that helps is reading the documentation for every option you put in your ~/.vimrc, and trying to fully understand what's happening there and why. And try to avoid blindly using other people's .vimrc's. Instead, use their .vimrc's for inspiration, transferring over only those parts you understand and find useful.

wyclif• 14 years ago

A thousand times yes to this, and not just because it's how I learned. It puts the commands into your muscle memory. You should not be trying to memorise anything; just follow the directions and don't move on until you complete each step. Then when you're done, do it again. Do vimtutor as many times as you need to until you really don't need to think about how to manipulate text.

And yes to the ~/.vimrc advice here. You should start with an empty dotfile and build up from there. DO NOT make the mistake of starting out by installing Janus. There shouldn't be anything in your ~/.vimrc until you understand what it does, and editing that file should be done incrementally by the user instead of being a copied file. This is part of the learning process.

Zoophy• 14 years ago

I wish I spent the time trying to learn vIm learning something which is actually productive instead of hoping to have a better editing/writing flow with some deprecated, obscure CLI editor with a way too steep learning curve.

sprobertson• 14 years ago

Learning Vim isn't that hard - it does take a few days of study to learn the core idioms of movement and manipulation, but once you wrap your head around it the rest is just practice and building muscle memory.

As far as "actually productive," having a better editing/writing flow is one of the biggest productivity enhancements I've encountered in my programming career.

danneu• 14 years ago

I learned Vim because the internet went out one day and I finally decided to check out `$ vimtutor`.

15 minutes later after learning commands like A, I, o, O, dd, p, and P it was clear to me that I wanted to use Vim seriously.

The hard part was arriving at a workflow, a set of plugins that I actually liked using. I imagine a great deal of people don't get to that point. I almost didn't. Especially since the commonly recommended plugins like NERDTree are awkward and clunky.

I think discovering CtrlP was the turning point for me.

A lot of luck was definitely involved. Sometimes I stay up at night wondering just how many versions of myself had given up on Vim when my wavefunction collapsed and I happened to be the chosen eigenstate that stuck with it.

RegEx• 14 years ago

CtrlP is the only plugin I use. It's really great.

bstar772• 14 years ago

Use this to learn vim: http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com

The parent's site offers nothing productive, in fact I think it causes more confusion with it's terrible UI, terrible content and erratic layout. I feel bad for being so critical, but resources like this are why learning vim was so hard in the first place. Why, when I click on the gigantic "Learn Vim Now" text, am I not directed to some actual learning resources?

zanny• 14 years ago

It says this within the first paragraph:

> It is not a guide to using Vim. Before reading this book you should be comfortable editing text in Vim

I think a site like the OP (even if it is shitty) is aimed more at the "I know what vim is, maybe I did visudo once and cried a bunch, but I have never touched it" crowd.

bstar772• 14 years ago

Then what is it for exactly? Vim has a bad enough reputation as being obtuse and antique. Sites like this just reinforce that perception.

ravichhabra• 14 years ago

"Games that teach VIM" category was created for VIM Adventures. It has an outdated information there. VIM Adventures now includes saving games. It should also add that currently there are 10 levels consisting of 30 shorcuts for the paid $9.90 version.

garethadams• 14 years ago

The "Exercises and Challenges" page [http://vim.begin-site.org/exercises/] states:

> VimGolf - “Real Vim ninjas count every keystroeke — do you?”

Obviously the writer isn't a ninja.

The Vim Beginners’ Site

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