Tips For Learning Vim

Things that have helped me on my journey towards Vimtopia

Yehuda recently wrote about his trials in trying to switch to Vim, the failed approaches, and what finally did work for him. I thought this was great, because different people learn in different ways, and the unique approach someone else comes up with might work well for you too. In that spirit, I wanted to share a few methods I used while learning Vim that worked well for me.

Separated into their own posts for digestibility, and in no particular order…

• Switching from the arrows to hjkl
• Remap Caps Lock to Control
• Don’t start from scratch

Don’t forget the built in help!

Vim has a ridiculously useful help system built in. This may seem obvious, but I always forget this fact and rush off to google to figure something out, and the search will regularly lead me back to the Vim docs.

  :help

Vim links

Here’s a few resources that helped me along:

• Learning vi and Vim O’Reilly book
• Daily Vim tips
• Best Vim Tips on vim.wikia.com

I highly recommend the O’Reilly book. It’s big, but it’s a worthwhile investment if you’re going to make Vim your One True Editor.

Posted on 04 Aug 2010 by Jim Garvin