An IDE Called Vim
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    • 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:

1 $ apt-get install vim-gnome

For centOS:

1 $ yum install vim-gnome

OpenBSD

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

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.

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.

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