Learn Vim the Smart Way

Learning Vim and Vimscript doesn't have to be hard. You need to learn it the smart way. 

There are many places to learn Vim: the is a great place to start and the has all the references you will ever need. 

However, the average user needs something more than and less than the . This guide attempts to bridge that gap by highlighting only the key features to learn the most useful parts of Vim in the least time possible.

Chances are you won't need all 100% of Vim features. You probably only need to know about 20% to become a powerful Vimmer. This guide will show you which Vim features you will find most useful.

This is an opinionated guide. It covers techniques that I often use when using Vim. The chapters are sequenced based on what I think would make the most logical sense for a beginner to learn Vim.

This guide is examples-heavy. When learning a new skill, examples are indispensable,

You can read this guide online here entirely for free.

Purchasing this guide will keep this project sustainable and support future guides. In addition, if you purchase the premium bundle, you will also get 200 screencasts covering the important parts of the guide.

Most screencasts are concise to go with the important parts of this guide. You can see two samples of them below:

Why Vimscript?

Some of you may wonder why do you need to learn Vimscript? In my first year of using Vim, I was content with just knowing how to use Vim. Time passed and I started needing Vimscript more and more to write custom commands for my specific editing needs. As you are mastering Vim, you will sooner or later need to learn Vimscript. So why not sooner? Vimscript is a small language. You can learn its fundamentals in just four chapters of this guide.

You can go far using Vim without knowing any Vimscript, but knowing it will help you excel even farther.

This guide is written for both beginner and advanced Vimmers. It starts out with broad and simple concepts and ends with specific and advanced concepts. If you're an advanced user already, I would encourage you to read this guide from start to finish anyway, because you will learn something new!

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Contents

Prologue

• Ch 0 - New to Vim? Read This First

Part 1: Using Vim

• Ch 01 - Starting Vim
• Ch 02 - Buffers, Windows, and Tabs
• Ch 03 - Opening and Searching Files
• Ch 04 - Vim Grammar
• Ch 05 - Moving in a File
• Ch 06 - Insert Mode
• Ch 07 - The Dot command
• Ch 08 - Registers
• Ch 09 - Macros
• Ch 10 - Undo
• Ch 11 - Visual Mode
• Ch 12 - Search and Substitute
• Ch 13 - The Global Command
• Ch 14 - External Commands
• Ch 15 - Command-line Mode
• Ch 16 - Tags
• Ch 17 - Fold
• Ch 18 - Git
• Ch 19 - Compile
• Ch 20 - Views, Sessions, and Viminfo

Part 2: Customizing Vim

• Ch 21 - Vimrc
• Ch 22 - Vim Packages
• Ch 23 - Vim Runtime

Part 3: Vim Scripting

• Ch 24 - Vimscript Basic Data Types
• Ch 25 - Vimscript Conditionals And Loops
• Ch 26 - Vimscript Variable Scopes
• Ch 27 - Vimscript Functions