Vim: Getting Started
Tips and pointers that helped me get started
I recently decided to pick up Vim, a text editor for Unix systems. It is largely used via a command-line interface. The editor itself is highly configurable with plenty of plug-ins available from a large community. If you are considering getting started yourself, let me warn you, you will feel highly ineffective for the first several weeks of using it. You may feel the urge to start adding every plugin you come across but vim already offers a ton out of the box. Learning the basics will be extremely important because it will enable you to level up faster.
As someone who recently took the plunge into vim, my hope is to share insights, tips, and suggestions to help you along in the process. One of the biggest issues for me was finding articles that catered to learning good vim practices without going straight to the mastery level. It is important to struggle through the early stages of learning a new tool and vim is no different.
Noob
You will be terrible vimming at first. It’s simply the nature of the beast here. You will have to work through several weeks of feeling ineffective. The solution? I luckily stumbled upon this article which broke down the getting started process into a four week journey. It recommends spending at least the first week doing vimtutor every day. I love this idea because you are not forced to work with vim within the context of the engineering work you do as your job. If you tried to get started that way, you would feel like a failure. It also recommends holding off on installing plugins or doing too much config via your ~/.vimrc file. Uncomplicated.
The transition to real work
As you begin to transition to working with vim to get your job done, I would still recommend staying pretty minimal on your plugins or config. When starting a session, at the top directory of your repo, drop yourself into the dark abyss that is the empty vim screen via$ vim. Get used to creating/navigating splits and opening file buffers. (hint: :vsp path/to/file.name opens a verticle split :sp … a horizontal one :e path/to/file.name would open that buffer in the currently selected window). This should now start to resemble a typical IDE.
This enabled you to use the vim registry appropriately. What? You don’t know about the vim registry? On to the docs!
The wiki is a great resource when trying to figure out how to do something as well as how to do it better. The search on it is great. I found myself using the docs a lot. However I would recommend keeping a piece of paper or a digital notepad open and jotting down every motion/action/shortcut you had to look up. Start by looking into vim’s registry.
To Config Or Not To Config
Definitely config. 100p config. You will find a lot of suggestions as to how you should configure your setup. You should mostly listen to these people. However your configuration is for you, not anyone else so configure it to your liking. Of course there are some best practices you should follow and you will find them be reading a bunch of blogs about how each vim ninja set up their own config. One of my favorite pieces on not only the configuration but how to level up in vim is the following article:
I hope this article helps you along the path of vim mastery. While it may not be a tool you use all the time, knowing how and when to use it will make it a very powerful tool in your toolbox. Please don’t hesitate to leave any questions or learnings you gained during your own getting started with vim experience.
