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)

Navigating text

We've covered some basic movements (by characters, words, and paragraphs), but Vim supports a lot more options for navigation.

Check the following if you want some movement within the current line:

  • As you already know, h and l move the cursor left and right, respectively
  • t (until) followed by a character allows you to search the line for that character and place the cursor before the character, while T allows you to search backward
  • f (find) followed by a character allows you to search the current line for that character and move the cursor to the character, while F allows you to search backward
  • _ takes you to the beginning of the line and $ takes you to the end of the line
A word consists of numbers, letters, and underscores. A WORD consists of any characters except for whitespace (like spaces, tabs, or newlines). This distinction helps with more precise...