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Interactive Vim tutorial

openvim.com

141–150 of 230 posts

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#142
post #87

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…

Sorry, but I think that's really bad advice. For one thing, it doesn't give new users any positive experience or reason to learn vim. If all you learn is to do things that are "pointless" (like learning hjkl), then you won't get any value out of vim. And if your way of learning is to do something that screws up your file and try to recreate how that happened, well, let's just say that every time I do something that s…

A lot of people learn vi out of necessity. Eventually, they have to SSH into a server and have to make minor changes to files where it's quicker to do it right there rather than use FTP or VCS. If that's the case, all you really need to know are the basics that the OP mentioned. After that, it's up to the person's personality to decide if there is value in learning further and more complicated commands.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#143

best way to learn vim: (optional) first, go thru vimtutor (just type vimtutor in your shell and press enter). second, get a vim cheat sheet (google). finally (most important), code a few things using vim. keep google at the ready to look up "how do (etc)?" to speed up things you're actually doing. once comfortable with that, maybe watch a few vim tips videos. after all that, you will probably find vim much more comfo…

I really liked having a "vim mug" as cheat sheet. If you drink hot liquids at your desk you'll have a mug anyway. This way it doubles as a vim reference while you're learning and you're probably less likely to lose it.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#144

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.

I disagree with the notion that you have to write your own vimrc from scratch in order to become a proficient vim user. Don't waste your time pouring over the documentation and trying to get things just right, vim is a pretty old program and a lot of useful config options are not on by default, nor are they easy to understand by a skim of the documentation. There's no point to having a deep understanding of them, bec…

I strongly disagree with your disagreement, but that's ok.

Writing my own vimrc from scratch (but obviously referencing others) was by far THE best learning tool for me.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#145

Author here. The tutorial succeeds if it gets people to have a superficial comprehension what Vim is about -- especially for those that have been putting off trying it out in a terminal. That's it. It doesn't really try to make you actually learn Vim. As a tutorial it could be made so much better. I don't have the energy slots for this project. But I feel anxious when I get feedback because I feel like there's some m…

Your side project made me switch from Nano to Vim on my servers through SSH. I aprehended vim with fear, and now I have the right level of confidence. Thank you!

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#146
It's using hardcore classic vim key bindings. Insert mode doesn't even start when pressing actual Ins. I understand some can have nostalgia for the times of archaic terminals, but I find it counter productive. Sorry, but I'm going to use Ins and regular arrow keys, not i and h,j,k,l.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#147

Is there something similar to this for emacs?

The emacs tutorial: ”Just type shit. Seriously. It’s a text editor. It works like you think it should. No autistic screeching required to enable edit mode to actually, you know, edit fucking text in a fucking text editor.” Do you know the command to quit vim? CTRL-Z sudo killall vim sudo apt uninstall vim

Good heavens, you've managed to imbue a classic editor flamewar comment with a surprising extra dose of incivility. This violates the guidelines, so please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#149
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…

I'm glad GVim works well for you in windows. Personally I like the simplicity of characters-in-characters-out that comes with working with vim in a terminal. I also like to be able to exit to bash and do redirection trickery on my recently saved files. For these reasons, I avoid GVim. MSYS2 (which uses MinTTY for its terminal) is what I use, and as far as I've noticed it supports all the bells and whistles that the w…

Yeah definitely, I regarded it as a failure to fall back to GVim. But my sanity and productivity was at stake.

I did spend a lot of time in Vim in DOS and loved the fact that it was even possible to do something productive there.

But I just started wasting more and more time on little details that didn't quite work.

It's even more frustrating when you compare to how perfectly it works in the Linux command line. Certainly in Linux I'll use regular Vim.

I've used very little of the GVim commands and got rid of the ugly menu so it looks like regular Vim.

But I have utmost respect for GVim for being forgiving and kind to a new user.

Re: Interactive Vim tutorial

#150

Author here. The tutorial succeeds if it gets people to have a superficial comprehension what Vim is about -- especially for those that have been putting off trying it out in a terminal. That's it. It doesn't really try to make you actually learn Vim. As a tutorial it could be made so much better. I don't have the energy slots for this project. But I feel anxious when I get feedback because I feel like there's some m…

Your side project made me switch from Nano to Vim on my servers through SSH. I aprehended vim with fear, and now I have the right level of confidence. Thank you!

That is heartwarming to hear :) You're welcome!
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