Practical VIM
by Drew Neil · first published 2012
81% recommend17% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Short, self-contained tips built around real editing tasks, explaining why Vim's techniques work as well as how. Suits people past vimtutor who want to build fluency and muscle memory.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It's available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you'll quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 8 and includes three brand-new tips and five fully revised tips. A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins
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…such things. Indeed there certainly some things that aren't the most useful or obvious but it's good to understand their original intent. Not to crap on the author of this but I'd recommend Drew Neil's Practical Vim over this (and pretty much every other Vim book). https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
on “Vim for Humans” ↗…explain -why- one would want to switch to emacs from vim. Org-mode and configuring emacs in a lisp-like are cool, but are not worth re-learning everything for me. I put that time in already by reading "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil and other vim literature online. I'm sure everyone is already aware, but vi is available basically everywhere. This has saved my ass at least twice where I couldn't access vim or had internet…
on “From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)” ↗Practical vim by Drew Neil is hands down the best vim learning resource out there. Nothing even comes close.
on “A Vim Guide for Advanced Users” ↗…randomly chosen examples, because mastering Vim involves mentally juggling a very large playbook of oddball features to complete editing tasks. The main resources to help you master Vim are the book "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil, and if you're ever in the unfortunate position of needing to write or edit a Vim plugin, "Learn Vimscript the Hard Way" is invaluable http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/
on “To Master Vim, Use It Like Language” ↗…start to read the vim manual, learn the key strokes one by one and then building my own distribution, that's when I really know how to use vim. Even so, I still learn many great things from books like Practical Vim by Drew Neil (on Tmux, there's Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development) I think you might already know that, but still shooting here for some quick tips. I don't have any shortcut, just that motto.
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?” ↗I can’t recommend enough the book Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Vim isn’t hard, and it’s faster than everything else. Vim is the one true editor (except for that other one true editor which is also ok).
on “Vim Galore: everything you need to know about Vim” ↗…proficient with Vim (or any other text editor) means. It means you organically pick up on things over time, such that you aren't having to think about it when using them. If you pick up Drew Neil's book "Practical Vim", it's structured around 121 "tips". Each one is short, clear, and something that you can pick up and internalize in an hour. After the first 24 or so, you will absolutely be more productive that you…
on “Vim After 11 Years (2013)” ↗…focus on teaching you enough conversational vocabulary for a vacation or business trip. If you want to immigrate to vi-land permanently, I'd suggest supplementing this with something like Drew Neil's "Practical Vim"[1] to learn the "bigger picture" stuff as well. [1]: http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim
on “Vim and Vi Tips: Essential Vim and Vi Editor Skills, free on Amazon today only” ↗I'd like to second this. There is a lot to Vim and Practical Vim is an excellent read. This book covers a lot of ground and the way it internally references itself is excellent (great for jumping around). Links for the lazy (non-affiliate) http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim…
on “Vim Adventures” ↗…recomposing commands and your command history for later execution (almost acme-like). Give the poor guy a chance. As a counterpoint to what I've pointed out above, I'd like to recommend Drew Neil's [Practical Vim](http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Thought-Pragmatic-Progra...) to anyone who hasn't read it already. It's got a lot of great content, and really goes a long way to explain vim's quirks and methods…
on “How to boost your Vim productivity” ↗I’d highly recommend Drew Neil’s Practical Vim[0] for much more like this; it’s broken down into easy chunks and gets into the _why_ as well as the _how_ of Vim’s techniques. Modern Vim[1], mentioned elsewhere in the comments, covers more advanced…
on “Intermediate Vim” ↗Drew Neil’s “Practical Vim” is absolutely fantastic, and really explain the mindset and way of thinking to use Vim. It’s probably the best technical book I’ve ever read... https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...
on “I Still Use Vim” ↗…Three Body-trilogy, Cixin Liu - The Children of Húrin, Tolkien - The Silmarillion, Tolkien - The Hobbit, Tolkien - Lord Of The Rings-trilogy, Tolkien - The Green Mile, Stephen King Non-fiction - Practical Vim 2nd ed., Drew Neil - Pestens år: döden i Stockholm 1710, Magnus Västerbro
on “Ask HN: What book(s) did you love reading this year?” ↗…that's not a big deal. You can always go back to VSCode. [1] https://github.com/Shougo/denite.nvim (many people use Telescope: https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim) [2] https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Thought-Pragmatic-Progr...
on “Ask HN: Is switching from VSCode to Vim worth it?” ↗There are the Practical Vim[0] and Modern Vim[1] by D. Neil And the VimL Primer[2] by B. Klein But Vim is a whole culture that starts with ed(1), the standard editor. You do edit based on line numbers and regex addressing and…
on “Vim 9.2 Released” ↗