An IDE Called Vim
An IDE Called Vim
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Who should read this book
What’s in this book
Conventions
Installing VIM
OpenBSD
MacOS
Windows
Vimtutor
Starting Vim
Learn how to use :help
Vim Modes
Move Around
Basic Operators
Basic Motions
Copying, cutting and pasting
Searching and substituting
Command history
Save and Exit
The minimum essentials
Nice to have
Search
Auto-completion
Indentation
File Finding
The Tags file
Jumping through files
Grepping
File Explorer
Tabs
Advanced Auto-Completion
Sessions
On mouse usage
Plugin Managers
Installing tmux

Pre-Basics

Installing VIM

Vim is available for all platforms and on very different versions and distributions. As so, in this section we will only tackle how to install a basic version of Vim for the major operating systems. But don’t worry, it will be more than enough to do everything we will show you in the following chapters.

Linux

The installation of Vim in Linux operating systems is pretty simple. I will recommend you install a package like vim or vim-gnome.

For Debian based distributions:

Code snippet

1 $ apt-get install vim-gnome

For centOS:

Code snippet

1 $ yum install vim-gnome

OpenBSD

For OpenBSD, the installation is also pretty straightforward. Using a package manager like pkg:

Code snippet

1 $ pkg install vim

MacOS

There are a couple of ways we can install Vim on MacOS. We will focus on installing it via Homebrew. Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS.

Code snippet

1 $ brew install vim && brew install macvim

If you need more information on installing Homebrew you can check the official website on http://brew.sh.

Windows

For Windows, you can either use the Debian based instructions if you’re using the Linux package for Windows 10, or you can download and run the executable available on https://rb.gy/kwhirb.

With Vim properly installed on your operating system of choice, we can proceed to the more interesting part.

Community Questions