Learning Vim - A Colleague's Question

I received the following email from my colleague this morning:

Hey buddy, finally taking the plunge to learn VIM because it will make me a lot more productive when working with Puppet manifests. Any helpful tips you've come across? I already set up my client with pathogen to allow me to easily use new plugins and I pulled in things like tabular, syntastic and puppet syntax highlighting. Love to hear anything else you'd recommend.

Thanks!

I love Vim and I've been using it for about four years as my only editor when coding in Python, typing up blog posts, or learning new programming languages. I even tried switching to Sublime Text 2 with Vim mode but I ended up switching back to straight Vim. So here are my recommendations for getting started.

It takes awhile to learn VIM but it's amazing once you do. I took the Vim cheatsheet and tried to learn a command each day. Just look for something that you either didn't know you could do, or try to do on a regular basis but aren't quite sure how. For example, I find/replace things all the times with regular expressions. Here's how you can easy do that globally in a file:

:%s/replace-this-text/replace-with-this-text/g

The major logical leap is understanding that Vim is basically a language where you have a command and it can be prefixed by a number to execute it multiple times. For example,

dd <-- cut the line and move it into the "clipboard"

5dd <-- cut 5 lines and move them into the "clipboard"

Definitely start out by checking out some interesting web tutorials. Here are some resources that I have found helpful over the years:

1. Vim as your IDE. Awesome article.
2. 7 Habits of Effective Text Editing great article on how to effectively use Vim.
3. Syntastic. Plugins for Vim. Important for things like syntax checking and code completion.
4. Vim Koans. A bit tongue-and-cheek but you can learn a lot from them as well.
5. Vim University. Some good introductory articles and screencasts.

A few random tips. I disabled the use of the arrow keys so I could get used to the "hlkj" movement. Do that with the following in your .vimrc file:

" disable arrow keys
map <up> <nop>
map <down> <nop>
map <left> <nop>
map <right> <nop>
imap <up> <nop>
imap <down> <nop>
imap <left> <nop>
imap <right> <nop>

Also if you prefer spaces to tabs just use set tabexpand in your .vimrc. Shift width and tab spaces usually default to 8 spaces, so I change that to 4 spaces with:

set ts=4
set shiftwidth=4

Vim takes awhile to get the hang of but once you get over that initial curve the editor feels like a natural extension of your thought process. The speed at which you can accomplish most tasks skyrockets after learning enough commands and embracing the philosophy of just using the keyboard for editing.