repo/_archives/vim-tutorial

Carlos Davide's vim tutorial

Made for NEECT's GeekTalk "Vim Workshop"

This is a tutorial that barely covers the surface of the true power of vim. It was made as a way to assist the workshop, but also as a "do it yourself" tutorial that the attendees, or anyone for that matter, could take home and play with.

Disclaimer

This tutorial is heavily inspired by my daily usage of vim. This means that I may have deliberately given more importance to some features rather than others depending on my personal (and to to be honest, probably skewed) opinion of what is important and what isn't.

This isn't meant to be the ultimate guide of vim, replace vimtutor (by the way, try vimtutor), or turn anyone into a vim guru. This tutorial has two goals:

• give complete noobs a decent level of comfort in about an hour;
• serve as future quick reference for the most used features.

Use vim!

The tutorial is written in a way that allows vim (and a terminal emulator) to be the only tool required to do it. Just open any of the files under tut/<section>/ and read/perform the tasks in that file.

The tutorials should be executed in the given order, but feel free to go back to revise anything you may have missed.

Using the helper.sh script

The helper.sh was built to assist in the workshop presentation, but in can also be useful if you are going through the tutorial.

You just have to source the file in bash:

$ . helper.sh

You will then have a few helper commands available to you:

$ tutcurr # open the current tutorial file (the first file when
you source the script)
$ tutprev # open the previous tutorial
$ tutnext # open the next tutorial

Start with a clean .vimrc

For this tutorial, it is recommended that you backup your .vimrc (if you have one) and use a minimal .vimrc (or none at all) instead.

Example:

" file: ${HOME}/.vimrc
"----------------------
" disable compatibility with vi, makes vim behave much better
" must be the first option, since it changes how other options behave
set nocompatible

" use 4 spaces instead of tabs
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4

" enable syntax highlighter
syntax on

" disable backup files
set noswapfile
set nobackup
set nowritebackup