Version Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life

workshop: Working with Vim, Part 1

Learning the Basics

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Wanted to try using Vim, but never got around to it? At this workshop, I'll show you the basics and the core philosophy of the text editor. You'll learn how to move around efficiently, juggle multiple files around, and, most importantly -- how to exit Vim!

#Training

This workshop is part 1 of the "Working with Vim" series. It's meant for beginners, people who have never even tried Vim, or maybe just use it once in a while when ssh-ing to the occasional server.

Vim has a reputation for having a steep learning curve, but its fundamentals are very internally consistent, and very powerful. Once you get an initial idea of how the keybindings work and why they work that way, it's only a matter of practice until navigating the editor becomes second nature.

If you visit the workshop, you'll learn a lot more than just moving around with "hjkl". You'll also learn much more efficient ways of movement, by words, by paragraphs, or even by semantic code blocks, like methods or classes. You'll understand how to open several files in Vim and work comfortably with them, you'll grok commands, and motions, and text objects.

One hour is not nearly enough to learn everything, but it's more than enough to give you a solid foundation that can kickstart your learning experience. Visit part 2 of the workshop as well -- I'll be talking about plugins, customizations and my own personal tips and tricks.