You Should Learn Vim

Vi IMproved, or Vim, is my favorite text editor. It has a big learning curve, and it’s certainly not beautiful, but it is tough as nails and is installed on almost every *nix system by default.

I want you to learn Vim because I think it’s the best tool for programming. I’m not an expert at Vim - I’ve been using it since February 2013, but I know enough to love it and recommend it to any programmer looking for a new, powerful editor.

vimtutor

If you have Vim installed, you most likely have vimtutor installed as well. Type vimtutor at your command-line and follow the ~30min tutorial built into Vim. It’s quite helpful and teaches you a great deal of Vim up front. You might not remember it all the first time, because there is a lot of stuff to learn. Try doing it once a day for three or four days, and it’ll begin to stick. Once you finish that, we can begin to actually use Vim.

Freedom

Here’s my set of commands you should know in Vim (case-sensitive!):

• i: Insert mode. This is the mode most editors are in by default. When you type, those letters actually appear in the document.- Escape: Escape exits whatever mode you are in back to normal mode. If you start messing things up, press escape.
• u: Undo. Bonus points if you set a persistent undo folder.
• CTRL-r: Redo.
• V: Visual block mode. You can select multiple lines in this mode and yank, delete, etc.
• y: Yank. Adds your selected text to a buffer and makes it pastable somewhere else.
• p: Paste. Pretty self-explanatory.
• x: Delete a single character.
• d: Beginning of delete motion. dw, for instance, deletes to the end of a word.
• dd: Deletes an entire line.
• ciw: The c motion removes and enters into insert mode. ciw deletes a word and goes into insert mode. I use this a ton.
• gg: Go to the beginning of the document.
• G: Go to the end of the document.
• 99k, 99j - All commands in Vim allow you to prefix with a number. For instance, typing 9k or 99k will go up nine lines, or ninety-nine lines.
• / - The forward-slash enters search mode, which will move your cursor to your search query if it exists on the page. Press enter to stop searching and stay at that result.

There’s a lot more commands than that, but you can be very effective in Vim just by knowing these short few. How about some customization?

Customization

Keep a .vimrc. Vim is incredibly customizable and you’ll benefit from spending some time tweaking it. Some of my favorites:

• vim-update-bundles is the best way I’ve seen for managing Vim plugins. Run vim-update-bundles after editing your .vimrc to install new plugins.
• Remap Caps Lock on your keyboard to Control. The EmacsWiki has a good guide to doing this on various systems.
• Steve Losh has a great blog post on setting some sane Vim defaults. It’s served as a good template for my own .vimrc. Definitely read through that.
• If you’re a Rails programmer, vim-rails is your new best friend. Commands like gf and :Rmodel user are incredibly powerful. If you ask me, it’s worth switching to Vim just for this plugin.

You can see my .vimrc on GitHub.

Vim has a reputation for being incredibly difficult, but with things like vimtutor, it becomes very demystified. I love Vim for its speed, portability, and power. Since I switched to Vim, I rarely leave the command-line during coding sessions, and in general my focus has increased. If you’re a beginning programmer looking to take the next step in your code, consider getting out of the GUI, and into Vim.

Finally, regarding other text editors. Some people like Emacs, others like Vim. I’ve used Vim, but I am interested in Emacs. Arguing about text editors is stupid - you don’t call someone out on what car they drive to work because that just makes you an asshole. That being said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this hilarious XKCD on editors: