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Interactive Vim tutorial

openvim.com

61–70 of 230 posts

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#61
post #42

All these tutorials are like taking beginner French. If you want to learn French live in France. If you want to learn Vim you have to live in it. Use it for your development full time. Then over time you start to see it's power. For me on Windows, GVim was the only sane option. Mostly because the Windows console can't fully handle syntax highlighting / italics. However it's also a good transition world. You've got al…

Sublime Text comes with a vim plugin. It isn't a perfect copy though.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#62

Alternatively, don't try to hurry enlightenment. First, learn :q! Next h,j,k,l Then i and ESC Finally :w Now you know vim. Don't let people tell you you're using too many keystrokes. Are you still reaching for the mouse? If not, you're using vim just fine. Most of the good stuff in vim, you'll learn accidentally, because you're in normal mode when you think you're in insert mode, or because you have caps lock on in n…

> Mode confusion is a feature, not a bug.

Then you realize that insert mode is the least useful mode there is.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#63

Here’s how I “learned” vim and many of the more proficient vimmers I know did too: go through vimtutor (type “vimtutor” on your command line), then write YOUR OWN .vimrc - in vim. Then use it and learn by doing.

Completely agree -- did the same the other day at the insistence of another Dev.

It's simpler and better at imparting the minimum viable working knowledge of Vim than any online tutorial -- you don't even need a net connection or a web browser. I'm by no means a competent Vim user but I did have the basics after 30 minutes which is what it advertised.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#64
Went through the tutorial, but I still don't think I really get why so many people seem to like Vim so much. The only thing there I noticed which was new to me from a functionality standpoint was the repeated commands feature.

Anyone have some better examples of things you can do with Vim that make it worth learning over a GUI-based editor like Atom?

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#65
post #42

All these tutorials are like taking beginner French. If you want to learn French live in France. If you want to learn Vim you have to live in it. Use it for your development full time. Then over time you start to see it's power. For me on Windows, GVim was the only sane option. Mostly because the Windows console can't fully handle syntax highlighting / italics. However it's also a good transition world. You've got al…

The Ubuntu shell on Windows 10 comes with vim and syntax highlighting.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#66

Alternatively, don't try to hurry enlightenment. First, learn :q! Next h,j,k,l Then i and ESC Finally :w Now you know vim. Don't let people tell you you're using too many keystrokes. Are you still reaching for the mouse? If not, you're using vim just fine. Most of the good stuff in vim, you'll learn accidentally, because you're in normal mode when you think you're in insert mode, or because you have caps lock on in n…

totally agreed. the best way to learn vim is slowly. teach your self one thing a day and use it all day. if you keep using it great, if not move on to the next thing. otherwise you get brain overload and someone is trying to teach you how THEY use vim and you don't create your own style.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#67

Alternatively, don't try to hurry enlightenment. First, learn :q! Next h,j,k,l Then i and ESC Finally :w Now you know vim. Don't let people tell you you're using too many keystrokes. Are you still reaching for the mouse? If not, you're using vim just fine. Most of the good stuff in vim, you'll learn accidentally, because you're in normal mode when you think you're in insert mode, or because you have caps lock on in n…

I'd argue that text objects are by far the biggest advantage vim has over other editing models. From my experience they are pretty easy to learn for programmers.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#68

Alternatively, don't try to hurry enlightenment. First, learn :q! Next h,j,k,l Then i and ESC Finally :w Now you know vim. Don't let people tell you you're using too many keystrokes. Are you still reaching for the mouse? If not, you're using vim just fine. Most of the good stuff in vim, you'll learn accidentally, because you're in normal mode when you think you're in insert mode, or because you have caps lock on in n…

I like the "Learn Vim Progressively" guide. It starts with just a few commands, and introduces new ones in small batches when you feel comfortable with the ones you're using.

http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

I'd add windows to your list of things to take a look at once you feel comfortable with the editor. You can split your workspace with ctrl+w followed by 'v' (vertical) or 's' (split). Then you can switch between those panes by pressing ctrl+w twice, or ctrl+w followed by hjkl or an arrow key. You can also resize the windows and stuff, it's great for things like viewing a header and source file at the same time.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#70

I started going through it, and unfortunately it takes control away from you way too often. I want to be able to toy around with the concepts after I learn them. I'd still recommend `vimtutor`.

I agree, I really hated the fact that you could only try things out in exactly the ways prescribed. It makes sense, if you're writing a tutorial like that in javascript in the browser, you don't want to just rewrite Vim. But it makes it a pretty frustrating tutorial to follow and kind of beats of the point of it.

I like Vim adventures a lot. I think it's a better approach than this in a lot of ways.

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