Learn How to Use VIM with an Interactive Tutorial

Sep 29, 2011 - 6 Comments

VIM tutorial

VIM is a powerful command line text editor that is wildly popular with developers and system administrators that is accessible by typing ‘vim’ in the terminal. For those that haven’t used it before, it has a relatively steep learning curve, and the interface can be confusing until you figure out how it works and start memorizing some of the commands. That’s what this interactive VIM tutorial aims to do, help you learn the basics of VIM so you can start using the text editor with some confidence.

Interactive Online OpenVIM Tutorial

The interactive guide is broken into 13 main lessons that cover the essentials: saving and quitting, moving around documents, character matching, finding and replacing characters, adding lines, etc. After you’re finished with the guide, there’s a sandbox to test things further if you still don’t want to jump into the real app yet.

Vim Tutor at the Command Line

You can also use a command that comes along with macOS, Mac OS X, and most linux distributions. Just launch the terminal and type:

vimtutor

The “vimtutor” command is installed by default in Mac OS X, it’s not as fancy (or interactive), but it’s still a great guide and it’s accessible from anywhere.

Learning VIM (and as a result, vi) is a fairly valuable skill and well worth your time if you plan on spending a lot of time in the command line, either for development purposes or just as a systems administrator, even if at a fairly novice level you’ll find it’s powerful.

VIM

Nice find from OneThingWell / LH

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Related articles:

Posted by: William Pearson in Command Line, Tips & Tricks

6 Comments

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  1. dat5h says:

    Also, usually when vim is installed, so is vimtutor. So, if you want a tutorial in an actual vim window (unrestricted by the web based tutor), go to the terminal and type “vimtutor” as one word.

  2. John says:

    An old but good quick ref guide is here.

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs312/2006fa/software/quick-vim.pdf

    vim isn’t for newbies, but neither is the cli in general.

  3. desc says:

    Or you could just use BBEdit or TextMate and be normal??

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