Fun with VIM: The Basics

Introduction

• Thank you for coming!


• Vim is fun! I hope you enjoy the presentation!


• Today geared toward absolute beginners
• Thursday after break will cover additional features


• First cover a little background, then start using vim


• Background
• Brief History
• Installation
• Resources
• Insert mode and normal mode

History

• vi: visual editor - Bill Joy - 1976 - BSD Unix
• Vi-IMitation - Bram Moolenaar - 1991
• Vi-IMproved - Bram Moolenaar - 1992
• Vim 5 - 1998
• Syntax highlighting
• Scripting language
• Vim 6 - 2001
• Folding
• Vertical splits
• Diff mode
• File Browser
• Command Window
• Vim 7 - 2006
• spell checking
• Dictionary in scripts
• Omni completion (ie intellisense)
• Tabbed editing

Installation

• Vim.org: The main vim page
• Download gvim71.exe to install


• Two versions:
1. Command line: vim
2. GUI: gvim


• On Windows, choose batch files option to get command line


• Note: Ada vim is broken - fixes are described in the 320 pages

Online References

• Vim.org: The main vim page


• Dr. Chip's Vim Page has lots of nice stuff


• User Manual and other documentation is here


• From within vim, get User Manual with :h user-manual


• Google


• Reference pages:
• Quick Reference Page 0
• Quick Reference Page 1
• Quick Reference Page 2
• Quick Reference Page 3

Books

• Vim.org books page


• Learning the vi Editor RU Library Electronic Resources (5th and 6th Editions)


• Learning the vi and vim Editors (7th Edition) from Amazon

Modes!!!!!

• Vim editor uses several modes
• Definition of modes: mode determines how vim responds to input


• Most important modes: normal and insert
• Startup in normal mode
• In startup mode, keystrokes are COMMANDS!
• Keystroke i changes to insert mode
• In insert mode, keystrokes are entered into the file!
• Keystroke ESC changes from insert mode to normal mode

Let's look at/edit some notes

• Here are my Notes on Basic Vim


• We will edit our notes so we can do what we're talking about


• Here is a sample .vimrc


• Here are my Notes Beyond the Basics with Vim [under construction] (notes for the presentation to be given in 2 weeks)

Benefits

• fast: keep hands on keys
• fast: minimal keystrokes
• powerful editing features (eg column operations)
• highly configurable (eg smartcase)
• extensible: scripting language built in, can also use perl, ruby, python
• ubiquitous
• use same environment for programming in any language

Advice

• Use vimtutor and the user manual
• Learn most frequently used operations til they are completely natural:
• Basic movement, input, changing
• Ranges/blocks
• Help
• To swap lines and characters
• Undo, redo
• Use abbreviations and <TAB> completion
• Add new commands as needed
• The more you learn, the easier it is to learn (because it's well designed)