Working with Vim, Part 1: Learning the Basics

Presented at Still Hacking Anyway (SHA2017), Aug. 5, 2017, 9 a.m. (60 minutes).

Wanted to try using Vim, but never got around to it? At this workshop, I'll show you the basics and the core philosophy of the text editor. You'll learn how to move around efficiently, juggle multiple files around, and, most importantly -- how to exit Vim! #Training This workshop is part 1 of the "Working with Vim" series. It's meant for beginners, people who have never even tried Vim, or maybe just use it once in a while when ssh-ing to the occasional server. Vim has a reputation for having a steep learning curve, but its fundamentals are very internally consistent, and very powerful. Once you get an initial idea of how the keybindings work and <strong>why</strong> they work that way, it's only a matter of practice until navigating the editor becomes second nature. If you visit the workshop, you'll learn a lot more than just moving around with "hjkl". You'll also learn much more efficient ways of movement, by words, by paragraphs, or even by semantic code blocks, like methods or classes. You'll understand how to open several files in Vim and work comfortably with them, you'll grok commands, and motions, and text objects. One hour is not nearly enough to learn everything, but it's more than enough to give you a solid foundation that can kickstart your learning experience. Visit part 2 of the workshop as well -- I'll be talking about plugins, customizations and my own personal tips and tricks.

Presenters:

  • Andrew Radev
    Web developer (Rails, Ember.js), sworn Vimmer. Professionally, I code mostly in Ruby, Rails, and a bit of Ember.js. In my spare time (and very non-professionally), I try to play around with all sorts of other stuff: Image processing, gamedev with Unity, opengl and webgl, Android, electronics, and any fun programming-related thing that crosses my path. I'm a dedicated Vim user and I've created a bunch of Vim plugins. I maintain the VimLinks twitter account, I'm one of the maintainers of the official ruby bindings for vim (but I'm pretty bad at keeping up with the work there), and I own the runtime files for Vim's eco support.

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