Before we start, let me explain how this little tutorial was started, basically I was tired of explaining vim usage on irc, and found myself doing it repeatedly, at the same time, I was too lazy to sit down and write my own "real" vim tutorial (I ignored the fact that I spent 10x the time explain stuff to people on line than it would have taking me to write a tutorial). So after one conversation explaining a large chunk of vim usage, I pulled it out of the logs, and published it (cropped and modified of course) here.
Tools you need to get started:
* You can get the vim sourcecode at Vim Sourcecode, it only takes a couple minutes to build, and you are ready!
* You can get the gVim installer for windows at Vim Windows Install, it is 3.4 megs, enjoy :)
To go thru this tutorial please open up a STANDARD xterm and with the command "xterm -fg white -bg black -fn fixed" and then run "export TERM=ansi; vim". If you get stuck, my name is "MetaCosm"(I play Socrates) and can be found on irc.openprojects.net in #vim (among other chans). If you happen to use windows, you will want to run this tutorial using plain old gvim (not Easy Gvim or ReadOnly Gvim), just about the entire tutorial should work for ya :). The only reason I don't recommend gvim for linux for this tutorial is because #1) Not everyone has it. #2) It can tempt people to use vim incorrectly during the tutorial, better to just use good old console vim.
Now, you will notice that it has a table of contents, and is broken into section, but that is just for ease of coming back where you left off, if you jump around you WILL be confused, and you WILL miss vital information that will make your vim experience less wonderful. This SEEMS like a long tutorial, but it really isn't once you realize a lot of the lines say stuff like "k", "ok", "cool", etc, it makes for REAL fast reading (under 30 mins for everyone I have had comment on it so far)
If you hate conversational (IRC) style, or are already a experience vim users and just want a quick sum-up of what is
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if v:lang =~ "utf8$" || v:lang =~ "UTF-8$" set fileencodings=utf-8,latin1 endif if v:version >= 700 "The following are a bit slow "for me to enable by default "set cursorline "highlight current line "set cursorcolumn "highlight current column endif "don't be backwards compatible with silly vi options set nocompatible "allow backspacing over everything in insert mode set bs=2 set viminfo='20,\"50 " read/write a .viminfo file, don't store more " than 50 lines of registers set history=50 " keep 50 lines of command line history "Always show cursor position set ruler if has("autocmd") " When editing a file, always jump to the last cursor position autocmd BufReadPost * \ if line("'\"") > 0 && line ("'\"") <= line("$") | \ exe "normal g'\"" | \ endif endif "This is necessary to allow pasting from outside vim. It turns off auto stuff. "You can tell you are in paste mode when the ruler is not visible set pastetoggle=<F2> "Usually annoys me set nowrap "Usually I don't care about case when searching set ignorecase "Only ignore case when we type lower case when searching set smartcase "I hate noise set visualbell "Show menu with possible completions set wildmenu "Ignore these files when completing names and in Explorer set wildignore=.svn,CVS,*.o,*.a,*.class,*.mo,*.la,*.so,*.obj,*.swp,*.jpg,*.png,*.xpm,*.gif """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" " Indenting """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" set autoindent set smartindent "The rest deal with whitespace handling and "mainly make sure hardtabs are never entered "as their interpretation is too non standard in my experience set softtabstop=4 " Note if you don't set expandtab, vi will automatically merge " runs of more than tabstop spaces into hardtabs. Clever but " not what I usually want. set expandtab set shiftwidth=4 set shiftround set nojoinspaces """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" " Dark background """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" "I always work on dark terminals set background=dark "Make the completion menus readable h
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