Hands-On: Learn Vim

Vim has a notoriously steep learning curve, and getting stuck in the editor is a common frustration for engineers. This course is a hands-on guide to how Vim actually works, built up from the absolute basics of surviving the editor. You will start with the fundamentals of opening files, inserting and appending text, and saving or throwing away changes on purpose, before learning how to get unstuck using the built-in help system and undo commands. From there, you will move past basic navigation to moving with intent, jumping to line numbers, finding characters, and repeating motions with a count. We then combine these movements with operators, teaching you how to delete, change, yank, and put text, and how to build compound commands and repeat your last change.

Once you have the muscle memory for basic edits, you will explore text objects to precisely target whole words, paragraphs, and text inside quotes or brackets using inner and around modifiers. The course then walks through searching and substituting text across lines, ranges, and entire files with confirmation, as well as visual and blockwise editing for selecting rectangles and inserting text down a column. Managing real-world projects requires handling several files at once, so we dedicate a module to splitting windows, moving between buffers, and copying text across files. Finally, you will learn advanced Vim mechanics: routing text through named registers, dropping marks to jump back to previous locations, and recording macros to replay edits across blocks of records. We wrap up by executing ex commands over ranges to sort and rewrite matching lines, and writing your own vimrc to tune search behavior and recover interrupted sessions.