Painless Vim: Everything you Want to Know about Vim

01 Oct 2014

Posted by Milos Dolobac

Have you tried Vim, but you found it hard to start and you just quitted it? Do you want to convince your colleague to use Vim?

Until recently, you have hard time. You certainly walked through Vim help system or you found some tutorials online, but real Vim’s guide to beginners was really missing.

Meet Painless Vim

Painless Vim by Nate Dickson is a new beginner’s guide to Vim. It promises to help you to get up to speed quickly. Book has 28 chapters and each chapter covers part of Vim step by step.

Book is short(166 pages), but it uses it’s space perfectly.

You will start with basics like navigation commands and what to put to your .vimrc and then you will move to other topics like remapping keys to your taste or tips and tricks for using insert mode.

In some chapters you will find some recommendation what to do and what you should avoid. For example in chapter about mapping keys, you will find out examples which keys you should remap and which you shouldn’t.

Chapters of the Book

  • 1 Get in, Get Out, Get Comfortable
  • 2 Moving Around in Vim: Baby Steps
  • 3 Your .vimrc File and You
  • 4 Interlude: The Joy of a Good Cheat Sheet
  • 5 Moving Around in Vim: Grown Up Steps
  • 6 Operators 1: Changing Letters and Lines
  • 7 Doing Things More Than Once
  • 8 Moving Around in Vim: Dance Steps
  • 9 Modes at Last
  • 10 Plugins
  • 11 Operators: Moving and Changing at the Same Time
  • 12 Interlude: How to Back Off Without Giving Up
  • 13 Registers: Clipboards as Far as the Eye Can See
  • 14 Text Origami. :h folding
  • 15 Searching and (More Importantly) Finding
  • 16 Using Vim’s Help System
  • 17 Doing Things at Vim Speed
  • 18 Mapping Keys
  • 19 Fancy Insert Mode Tricks
  • 20 Vim Windows Are Not Microsoft Windows
  • 21 Tab Pages Are Not Browser Tabs
  • 22 Interlude: Reviewing Views
  • 23 How Vim Thinks
  • 24 Visual Mode Basics
  • 25 Vim GUIs
  • 26 Menus Everywhere
  • 27 Literary Vim: Writing Prose in Vim
  • 28 Conclusion

Painless Vim is a great beginners guide that I can recommend you. There was never been step by step guide to Vim like this. If you’ve tried Vim in the past, give it another chance. That’s book is really worth of it.

You can buy the book on Leanpub, where you can get book in three formats: PDF, EPUB and MOBI and you will get access to future updates of the book.

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