Vim Reference Guide

About

Vim Reference Guide is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. It has more in common with cheatsheets than a typical text book. Topics like Regular Expressions and Macros have more detailed explanations and examples due to their complexity.

The features covered in this guide are shaped and limited by my own experiences since 2007. I had a rough beginning as a design engineer having to learn Linux command line, Vim and Perl on the job. I distinctly remember progressing from dd (delete current line) to d↓ (delete current line as well as the line below) and feeling happy that it reduced time spent on editing. I didn't know about count prefix or the various ways I could've deleted all the lines from the beginning of the file to the line containing a specific phrase. Or even better, I could've automated editing multiple files if I had been familiar with Sed or progressed that far with Perl.

I hope this guide would make it much easier for you to discover Vim features and learning resources than my own blundering experience.

Promo video

Visit this playlist for video demos on most of the topics from the ebook.

Prerequisites

I do give a brief introduction to get started with using Vim, but having prior experience would be ideal before using this resource. As a minimum requirement, you should be able to use vimtutor on your own.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading manuals, searching online, visiting external links provided for further reading, tinkering with the illustrated examples, asking for help when you are stuck and so on. In other words, be proactive and curious instead of just consuming the content passively.

Testimonials

Got several suggestions and feedback when my submission about this book reached the front page of Hacker News.

Great job on this! — rendall

Hi, great work releasing this! Trying to explain vim concisely is always an interesting challenge and I had a great time reading your attempt in this book. I always find it really interesting on how people try to group certain vim functions in a way that makes sense to people that don't use vim. I think you cover that idea pretty well in your 'Vim philosophy and features' section whilst not making it overly abstract and keeping it relatable. — doix

Neat stuff! One piece of feedback is that I would include "+p and "+yy in the copy and paste section. — mrpotato

I learnt regular expression by reading your books, thank you for the great work. — LamJH

A comment from another Hacker News thread:

I stumbled upon your vi post a few days ago, really like the style. Keep it up!

Sample chapters

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters on GitHub.

GitHub repo

Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference for markdown source and other details related to the book.

Chapters

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. Insert mode
4. Normal mode
5. Command-line mode
6. Visual mode
7. Regular Expressions
8. Macro
9. Customizing Vim
10. CLI options

Feedback and Errata

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this ebook. It could be anything from a simple thank you, Gumroad rating, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

You can reach me via:

• Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference/issues
• E-mail: learnbyexample.net@gmail.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample