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)

Learning the syntax

Let's take a lightning-fast deep dive into Vimscript's syntax.

This section assumes you're comfortable with at least one programming language, conditional statements and loops in particular. If that's not the case, you will most certainly be better off finding a more extensive tutorial. Vimscript deserves its own book, and Steve Losh wrote just that: Learn Vimscript the Hard Way is easily the best Vimscript tutorial available (and it's free on the web!).

Setting variables

You've already discovered some basics of Vimscript syntax. To set internal Vim options, you use the set keyword:

set background=dark

To assign a value to a non-internal variable, use the let keyword:

let animal_name...