Tutorial for vim geared towards complete beginners. With this, you should be able to competently use vim in the terminal.
WIP
Like everything in life, when first learning something new, try establishing a basic framework you can later integrate more complexity. To develop this framework, you can go to Absolute Basics.
Before you start the tutorial, make sure you have vim installed using vi --version | head -1. You should see that you have VIM - Vi IMproved like below. If you do not see this, search on the internet "how to install vim on " (if you are using wsl, make sure to choose the linux distro your subsystem is running).
$ vi --version | head -1
VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1 (2024 Jan 02, compiled May 03 2024 02:45:42)
The first time a command is used in the tutorial, a ✨ will be placed in front of that command. Important concepts will be marked with a 🔴.
This section will cover the most bare-bones usage of vim. With this, you will be able make a file, move around inside that file, and save the file, but not much else. You should be able to finish this section in less than 5 minutes.
To begin, we are going to create a text file named example.txt. We can do this one of two ways: using touch to create a file then opening it with vi / vim or using vi / vim to create a file and open that file in a single command.
# method 1: creating a file with touch
$ touch example.txt
$ vi example.txt
# method 2: creating a file with vi
$ vi example.txt
You should see a screen that looks like the one below.
By default, you are in "normal" mode. In normal mode, you cannot type. To begin typing, you need to hit ✨ i, which puts you into "insert" mode. You will know you are in insert mode with a flag at the bottom of the terminal as below.
Once in insert mode, you can begin typing like usual. Let's type some example text.
This is some example text.
If you want to go to a new line, you can use ✨ enter as expected. Let's create another line with some more text.
This is some example text.
You get another line when hitting enter.
Now that we have some text, let's navigate around and edit some text. After typing, your location in the text (indicated by the flashing white box) should be at the end of the file.
We can navigate between lines using the ✨ the up arrow key to move up a line and the ✨ the down arrow key to move down a line. Similarly, we can navigate inside of a line by using ✨ the left arrow key to move left and ✨ the right arrow key to move right. Using the arrow keys, navigate in the file so your cursor is in the same spot as mine.
A quick aside, there are many ways to move in an between lines in vim. The arrow keys will always work, but they quite far away from where your hand usually is. Instead of using the arrow keys, most vim users use ✨ h to move left a character, ✨ j to move down a line, ✨ k to move up a line, and ✨ l to move right a character. However, these motions only work in normal mode. If you are insert mode, you can preface h, j, k, l with alt to use the same motions as before. For example, you would type ✨ Alt + j to move down a line while in insert mode.
Notice the cursor over the "e" in example. 🔴 When entering text, you will insert the text before the cursor. In this case, we any text we enter will go after "This is some " and shift "example text." to the right.
Let's add some more text into the first line.
This is some more or additional example text.
You get another line when hitting enter.
Rereading this sentence, it seems somewhat repetitive. Let's remove " or additional" to make the sentence more concise. We can remove text with ✨ the backspace key as per usual. After the change, your text file should read as follows.
This is some more example text.
You get another line when hitting enter.
After these revisions, we are ready to save the file. To save, we need to get back into normal mode by using ✨ the esc key. Once we are back in normal mode, the "-- INSERT --" at the bottom of the screen will have gone away.
🔴 To determine which mode you are in, look at the bottom of the screen. If there is no indicator, you are in normal mode. If there is an indicator, it will tell you what mode you are in.
Now that we are in normal mode, we want to save and close the file. To do this, we first hit ✨ :, which shows at the bottom of the screen and indicates you want to enter certain commands.
After entering this "command" mode. We can save the changes we have made and close the file by typing ✨ wq after the : and then hitting enter.
Here, wq stands for "write" and "quit", which saves the changes made to the file and closes it aswell.
You can also execute these commands independently. For example, you can use :w if you want to save your work, but still continue editing the file. Also, if you want to quit a file without making any changes, you can use :q.
🔴 If you are ever lost while using vim, you can usually regain your bearings by hitting the esc key a few times to return to normal mode.
With this, you now have the basic framework to create, navigate, and edit files using vim.
After developing your basic vim framework, you may find that editing is quite cumbersome with usage of the arrow keys. This section will cover some of the luxuries that allow you to move between lines far quicker.
For this example, we will work with the quicker-navigation.txt file in this repository. You can copy the entire repository using the following command.
$ cd ~/projects
$ git clone https://github.com/jspecht3/vim-tutorial
$ cd ~/projects/vim-tutorial
This takes This assumes you have a projects directory. If not, you should make one with mkdir ~/projects.
After running the commands above, you will be in the vim-tutorial directory. Let's open quicker-navigation.txt and work inside.
$ vi quicker-navigation.txt
quicker-navigation.txt looks like this.
---quicker-navigation
Here, as long as we believe the author, we can can look at the bottom of the file and see there are fourteen lines. Personally, if don't trust the author and want to verify (I hear the author of this file is a bit strange).
Let's check how many lines there are by jumping to the bottom of the file. We can just to the bottom of the file by using ✨ G.
A quick aside. 🔴 In vim, commands are case sensitive, so G will do something different than g.
🔴 As a general rule, commands will almost always be used in normal mode. From now on, it will be assumed that commands are used in normal mode. As a reminder, normal mode can be entered by hitting esc and noticing nothing on the bottom line.
Back to the bottom, we can now see that there are in fact fourteen lines by looking at the very bottom of the terminal.