Site Map - skip to main content

Hacker Public Radio

Your ideas, projects, opinions - podcasted.

New episodes Monday through Friday.


hpr1737 :: Five Steps to Vim

Frank Bell discusses how he learned to stop worrying and love the vim

<< First, < Previous, Latest >>

Host Image
Hosted by Frank Bell on Tuesday 2015-03-31 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: vim,text editor.

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. | Comments (3)

Part of the series: Vim Hints

Various contributors lead us on a journey of discovery of the Vim (and vi) editors.

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

https://www.vim.org/about.php

The vim editor is based on the venerable vi editor, which dates from the very early days of Unix. Many persons find it intimidating for the absence of a menu bar, a terse command set that is very much its own, and its "modal" design.

Nevertheless, under its plain surface is a powerful and versatile tool. Frank Bell describes his five steps to learning to use and love vim.

  1. Use a .vimrc file.
  2. Train yourself to change modes.
  3. Learn and use a few basic commands. These should be enough to get you going: x, dd, dw (to delete text); cw (change a work); yy ("yank" or copy a line); p and P (to paste text); u (undo); w ("write") or save text; q (quit vim).
  4. Don't force yourself to move the cursor with the h-j-k-l keys if that doesn't feel natural. Use the arrow keys.
  5. Use vim to write stuff.

Links:

Show Transcript

Automatically generated using whisper

whisper --model tiny --language en hpr1737.wav

<< First, < Previous, Latest >>


Comments

Subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Comment #1 posted on 2015-03-31T11:18:49Z by zloster

Small problem

The first two links in the notes have a broken href value: .

Comment #2 posted on 2015-03-31T12:31:28Z by Dave Morriss

Re: Small problem

Fixed!

Comment #3 posted on 2015-03-31T18:56:47Z by Dave Morriss

Great show!

Hi Frank,

This was enjoyable. A good way to help people nervous about Vim get past the first hurdles.

Dave

<< First, < Previous, Latest >>

Leave Comment

Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.

Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).

Provide feedback
Your Name/Handle:
Title:
Comment:
Anti Spam Question: What does the P in HPR stand for ?
Are you a spammer →
Who hosted this show →
What does HPR mean to you ?