Learning vim

Tips on learning Vim as I moved my primary toolchain to Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2

Getting started

• Josean Martinez has:

  • a very helpful video The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Learn and Master Vim
  • a Vim essentials cheatsheet

• Enable Vim keybindings in your current editor (VSCode, Obsidian)

• Start with the video Effective Neovim: Instant IDE which uses the kickstart.nvim code

• The popular YouTuber and Twitch streamer “The Primeagen” has lots of good content on Vim, but I’d start with his 7-part tutorial on Vim As Your Editor

• I started with this t

• Learning Vim in a week

• Vim cheatsheet tutorial and UK version

• Vim colour schemes

• Pick a theme.

Tips and tricks

• Improving Vim’s startup time, particularly the one-liner
  vim --startuptime vim.log

Going deeper

• Book and video https://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/boost-your-coding-fu-with-vscode-and-vim/foreword/
• Marcus Kazmierczak’s excellent Working with Vim series
• Improving Vim Speed, with Santi Younger’s very helpful notes:

1:00 vim has a mythology of being impossibly hard.
2:30 Stay out of insert mode.
3:30 Disable arrows, to work on getting used to hjkl movement.
4:20 As you get more advanced let go of hjkl
5:00 learn advanced shortcuts:
w to move one word at a time
b (back)
e (ends of words)
ge (back end of words)
f (find)
5:50 advanced functions to delete chunks of phrases t ct
7:12 delete find df (delete until it finds a specific symbol you are looking for)
8:40 relative numbers (example -16,-1co.) this copy pastes a chunk above the line where you are (or below)
9:20 H M L (high medium low)

• Greg Hurrell’s Vim screencasts
• Thoughtbot’s How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)
• Brodie Robertson’s YouTube videos on Vim and Linux - for example FZF Vim Is Hands Down The Best Vim Fuzzy Finder
• Look at the Vim plugins from Tim Pope

History

• Bill Joy’s invention of vi
• Why vim uses hjkl keys as arrow keys.
• Wikipedia has a page with a keyboard layout of the ADM-3A terminal

Muscle memory

• VimGolf
• Vim Adventures - chargeable for a 6-month licence
• Rescue Sleeping Beauty using Vim keys.

Re-mapping Esc key

• Long discussion on ycombinator of options for alternate keys, particularly
  • Mapping jk to Esc
  • Making CapsLock be Esc on a single press, and CapsLock when pressed in combination with another key

Ultimate Vim .rc: https://github.com/amix/vimrc