Book Image

Mastering Vim

By : Ruslan Osipov
Book Image

Mastering Vim

By: Ruslan Osipov

Overview of this book

Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript. By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Installing and configuring Neovim

Neovim and its installation instructions are available from GitHub at https://github.com/neovim/neovim. You can either download the binary, or install it through one of the package managers. The installation instructions are rather detailed, and may change rather quickly, so you should give them a read at https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Installing-Neovim.
If you are working on Debian based Linux distribution, you can install Neovim by running: $ sudo apt-get install neovim and $ Python3 -m pip install neovim to add Python3 to support neovim.

Once you install Neovim, it's available through the nvim command:

$ nvim

You're greeted by a screen similar to a vanilla Vim intro screen:

All of the commands familiar to you from Vim will work, and Neovim uses the same configuration format as Vim. However, your .vimrc is not picked up automatically...