Starting Vim

Starting Vim

Vim is a text editor; that’s all it does. You can’t format a document, insert shapes, make a table with lines, use multiple fonts, highlight sentences, or print out with headings or margins. Vim, however, is very good at editing text. Once you’ve mastered Vim, it is very powerful. You can find and replace chunks of text using commands, copy and paste columns of data, and jump to a specified line number–all with a couple of keystrokes.

What is a text editor?

We sometimes call programs like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer “text editors”, but we need to be a bit more careful when it comes to programming.

By default, Microsoft Word uses .docx files to store not only text, but also formatting information about fonts, headings, and so on. This extra information isn’t stored as characters, and doesn’t mean anything to tools like head: they expect input files to contain nothing but the letters, digits and punctuation on a standard computer keyboard. When editing programs, therefore, you must either use a plain text editor, or be careful to save files as plain text.

Vim is also everywhere. If you are working on a computer with a shell (such as terminal or gitbash), then you have Vim; it’s already there. And you can open it directly from the shell. The problem is, however, that Vim is notoriously difficult to learn.

Let’s create a new file with Vim. First, open your shell, then type:

vim new-file.txt

Yay, a new file! Now, close that file. Type:

:q

Ta-da! Congratulations, you’ve exited vim.

Text editing

So, you’ve created and exited a file with Vim. Your next challenge is to put some text inside the file. Open your file again:

vim new-file.txt

Now, try and type some text. What’s happening? You are currently in Normal (or ‘control’) mode. To add text, you need to be in Insert or ‘edit’ mode.

To enter Insert mode, type i. You can now type! Add some text:

Yey I can now add words to my file! This wasn't difficult at all!

How do you save your work? Ctrl + s will not help you. First, you need to go back to Normal mode by pressing Esc, then type:

:w

(If you spend too much time working in Vim, your text documents start to accumulate random :w in them.) Now, you can safely quit vim again:

:q

Practice this. Re-open your vim document, enter insert mode, and add some more random text.

There is also a command for saving and exiting all in one instruction. Press Esc, then type:

:x

Phew! You had little control over where your new text went in the last exercise. How do you move around in vim? In Normal mode, you can move one character at a time using your arrow keys, or the keys K (up), L (right), H (left), and J (down).

Once you are in place, type i to enter Insert mode on the left-hand-side of the current character. You can also type a to enter Insert mode on the right-hand-side (think (a)fter the character). Try this out and add some more text.

Summary of Vim modes

Vim has several modes. For our purposes, the Normal mode and Insert mode are the most important.

• Normal mode is the default mode for navigating and manipulating text.
  • To enter, press Esc from any other mode.
  • Use this mode for moving around the file, deleting text, copying, pasting, and other commands.
• Insert mode is used for inserting and editing text.
  • To enter this mode, press i, I, a, A, o, or O from Normal mode.
  • Use this mode to type text directly into the document.

Useful shortcuts

• /pattern searches forward from the current cursor position for the text matching pattern. Type /, type the search term (pattern), and press Enter.
  • To search for the word “example”: first, ensure you are in Normal mode by pressing Esc. Then type /example and press Enter.
  • To navigate search results, n moves to the next occurrence of the search pattern.
  • N moves to the previous occurrence of the search pattern.
• ?pattern searches backward from the current cursor position for the text matching pattern. Press ?, type the search term (pattern), and press Enter.
  • To search backward for the word “example”, you would type ?example in Normal mode and press Enter.

For more useful shortcuts, refer to my post Cheatsheet of Vim shortcuts.

Acknowledgments

This material is derived from work that is copyright © The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org/) made available under the CC BY 4.0 license.