The Land of Vim Part 1: Getting Started

Vim is intimidating, there I said it, but it doesn’t have to be!

There were primarily three reasons why I chose to switch over, the first being that a large amount of experienced developers use Vim and it would make it infinitely easier to pair program if I at least knew some basic commands, the second was recognizing the difference in productivity in keybinding vs clicking (I have World of Warcraft to thank for that), the third and last was that Vim made me uncomfortable and I wanted to change that.

Here’s what I did to get started. Vim is installed by default on all Unix based systems, but there is a downloadable version for Windows as well. I first came into contact with Vim while on a Linux machine and briefly freaked out because I couldn’t figure out how to exit it, then I downloaded the Windows version where I played around with it for a couple hours, but I didn’t actually start seriously using/learning Vim until I got my Mac. So most of this advice will be geared towards Mac users (Linux users might benefit as well).

On the command line if you type vimtutor this will bring up a really handy tutorial which will go over the basic commands and can be completed in approximately 30 minutes.

There are also various mini-games/tutorials that can help you get used to text navigation and basic commands, the ones I used were:
Vim Adventures
Vim Golf
Interactive Vim Tutorial
Video Tutorials
Vim Cheat Sheet

The real learning (for me anyway) came when I put this new found knowledge to use by writing code. I learned the navigation fairly quickly, but things like copy/paste, switching between windows/tabs, opening a new window horizontally/vertically, were all things that I had to google a few times before committing it to muscle memory. I learn new commands as I find a use for them rather than trying to memorize a bunch of different commands all at once.