Open this file in vi then follow along by using j to move down.
Vim is one of my favorite tools, which is an odd thing to write about a text editor. If you are a developer, you spend most of your time editing text documents. If you are a lucky developer, those documents will be consistently formatted. Most of your mental energy is spent thinking how to solve a problem or implement an algorithm. Most of your time is spent copy and pasting, searching for a declaration, changing camel case variables to snake case, indenting and re-indenting.
When I primarily used an IDE, I would constantly move from keyboard to mouse with my
hand poised over the control-C/control-V (C-C and C-V from now on). I could
copy a code block then copy/paste a new variable name or other alteration and get
into a groove of double click, C-V. With vim, you yank and put, move to
a location with laser precision and hardly ever touch the mouse. But it gets better,
you can write a macro with a single stroke, q, and play it back over 100 lines.
You can craft the perfect substitute command and execute it on every source file
in your project. On the continuum of expertise, vim let's you quickly pick how
to balance flexibility, repeatability, and robustness to minimize the only metric
that matters, wall-clock time. As the boring parts of editing text take less time,
you spend more time thinking and working on harder problems. The text just flows
and slowly mutates while you envision what to write.
First, I should clarify what we will learn by stating what will not be covered. This workshop is meant to be a stepping stone towards vim mastery. I expect you to know how to navigate in files and perform some modifications. A common workflow would be "open file, go to line, use arrow keys to get to a word, change the word then save and exit". You should know how to get into and out of normal and insert mode and can use vim like nano.
At the other end, advanced vim for me means having all the plugins needed to make your session effectively an IDE and integrate with any other tools you need. We will not cover this for a few reasons:
- Plugins add a lot of cruft to vim
- Plugins are open source, actively developed, and therefore tend to change
- All of what we will cover is suitable for any vim flavor (neovim or IDE plugins)
- The best set of tools for your work is highly variable
My best advice, regardless of your level, is to stay away from pre-built configurations like astrovim, lunarvim, etc. They do a great job of getting lots of plugins to play together, but they will overwhelm you with hotkeys and features you will never use. You can look them over for inspiration, but really think about a pain point you have and search for a solution instead of looking at plugins that seem interesting.
You need to have vim installed. While there shouldn't be any version-specific information, we will be using vim, version 8, which is installed on most RC systems.
Your ~/.vimrc file is where you can add personal configurations to vim. We are going to start with a limited set of vimrc options so we have approximately the same minimal, environment.
Some additions may be recommended but this will be a good start.
Relative numbering is a great way to assist with multiline commands and jumps.
If you want to improve your usage of #j and other movement commands, I highly
recommend slowing key repeat and increasing repeat delay in your OS!
To make this your vimrc, first back up your current one (if you have one) with:
mv ~/.vimrc ~/.vimrc.bak
Depending on your OS, you may have a different location for your vimrc
or you might not have a ~/.vimrc at all
in which case the mv command will fail, which is ok.
next copy the included vimrc to ~/.vimrc with:
cp class_vimrc.txt ~/.vimrc
After you've made run these two commands, try to open your .vimrc in vim and take a look at the different settings
vi ~/.vimrc
After covering some basics, we will work through several example editing tasks to introduce solutions at several levels. Often, the fastest way to edit a single line is not the fastest to edit 10 lines and a different solution is required for 1000 lines.