Getting Started

Welcome to Mastering Vim, a book that will teach you how to get good with Vim, its plugins, and its ideological successors!

This chapter will establish a foundation for working with Vim. Every tool is built with a particular usage philosophy in mind, and Vim is no exception. Vim introduces a different way of working with text compared to what most people are used to these days. This chapter focuses on highlighting these differences and establishing a set of healthy editing habits. It will let you approach Vim with a Vim-friendly frame of mind and will ensure you’re using the right tools for the job. To make examples concrete, we will be using Vim to create a small Python application throughout this chapter.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The difference between major Vim versions
• Modal versus modeless interfaces, and why is Vim different from other editors
• Installing and updating Vim
• The gVim – the graphical user interface for Vim
• Configuring Vim for working with Python and editing your configuration
• Common file operations – opening, modifying, saving, and closing files
• Moving around – navigating with arrow keys and cursor movement keys, by words, paragraphs, and so on
• Making simple edits to files and combining editing commands with movement commands
• Persistent undo history
• Navigating the built-in Vim manual