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hpr1737 :: Five Steps to Vim

Frank Bell discusses how he learned to stop worrying and love the vim

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Hosted by Frank Bell on Tuesday, 2015-03-31 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
vim, text editor. 3.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1737

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Duration: 00:22:19

Vim Hints.

Various contributors lead us on a journey of discovery of the Vim (and vi) editors.

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

https://www.vim.org/about.php

The vim editor is based on the venerable vi editor, which dates from the very early days of Unix. Many persons find it intimidating for the absence of a menu bar, a terse command set that is very much its own, and its "modal" design.

Nevertheless, under its plain surface is a powerful and versatile tool. Frank Bell describes his five steps to learning to use and love vim.

  1. Use a .vimrc file.
  2. Train yourself to change modes.
  3. Learn and use a few basic commands. These should be enough to get you going: x, dd, dw (to delete text); cw (change a work); yy ("yank" or copy a line); p and P (to paste text); u (undo); w ("write") or save text; q (quit vim).
  4. Don't force yourself to move the cursor with the h-j-k-l keys if that doesn't feel natural. Use the arrow keys.
  5. Use vim to write stuff.

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Comment #1 posted on 2015-03-31 11:18:49 by zloster

Small problem

The first two links in the notes have a broken href value: .

Comment #2 posted on 2015-03-31 12:31:28 by Dave Morriss

Re: Small problem

Fixed!

Comment #3 posted on 2015-03-31 18:56:47 by Dave Morriss

Great show!

Hi Frank,

This was enjoyable. A good way to help people nervous about Vim get past the first hurdles.

Dave

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