Well, that was fast.

Use Vim Like A Pro is now available as a book, so you can use kindle, nook, or your favorite book reader (even if it's a pdf reader).

It's already somewhat useful, and people have started downloading copies. A few kind souls even went beyond the $0.00 minimum price and gave me a little cash for my trouble.

It's okay with me if you download it for free. The original version was a simple blog page, and everyone could use it for free. I set the "suggested price" to USD$5.00 but it's really not necessary. I'm not making my living from this little tutorial.

It's really okay if you want to contribute content or corrections. I don't have any real intention of making this a 200-page tome (there are already great, comprehensive books; I want this to be a small jumpstart for busy people).

The leanpub markdown files are very easy to edit, so I will be more responsive with corrections. I'll try to put a little time into this every week.

In the future, I plan on putting screenshots in and show some of the cooler visual features.

I still use vim for a lot of my daily editing tasks. I use language-specific editors as well, and IDEs. I'm not an editor bigot. I even have two emaxen installed on my Mac. I still have a soft spot in my heart for vim, and probably always will.

I hope you learn to love it as well.

Going to Book Format

Thanks for visiting.

After playing with the idea of resurrecting the tutorial in blog form, and simply not finding the time to do it justice here, I'm importing the article into ebook format and will edit it in markdown as a LeanPub book.

I will make it available quite cheaply (or possibly set the minimum price to $US0.00 with a cheap "suggested" price).

I will delete this blog in a few weeks/month.

Thanks if you've visited once or more, and especially to those who've left comments.

Tim

A Good Start

Yesterday I got a start on republishing the tutorial (herein UVLAP), with just under half of the content added and a bit of it edited.

I ran into a bug that won't let me add more pages just yet, so I will edit and Corey and add images and other media as tome allows.

I will be adding the rest as son as I can.

This is an exciting time because we also have a public-facing project at industrial logic, hopefully going live in the next few days.

Bear with me and please send suggestions and corrections and contributions, because I don't intend to do this alone or let it languish as I did the old html version.

Thanks for all the support and attention you've given UVLAP in the past.

Welcome to Use Vim Like A Pro

Welcome to the new home of Use Vim Like A Pro, a humble vim tutorial brought to you by Tim Ottinger.

This tutorial sat in native html in a single page for many years. When the blog's provider went belly-up, Tim moved it here. It is an older tutorial with a pretty decent following (and spent a weekend at the top of Hacker News once, years after it languished quietly).

This is neither the first, nor the most comprehensive of all the Vim tutorials. It does, however have its own approach that may help you learn faster.

Vim is a text editor commonly used by programmers in many environments, primarily the unix-like ones (linux, Mac OS X, and the like0 but also in Microsoft windows. Vim is a very productive and fast editor that handles huge files and has very little cpu footprint. It's also not the friendliest environment to a programmer who finds himself thrust into it without any preparation.

This is your preparation.

Tim is also a co-author of Agile In A Flash and one of the many contributing authors of Clean Code, an employee of Industrial Logic, and a blogger with frequent postings at Agile In A Flash blog and his own Agile Otter blog.

Tim hopes you find the tutorial useful, and will try to keep up with updates, improvements, corrections, and possibly new additions (screen shots, videos, etc) as time allows.

Enjoy learning to use Vim. It's a pretty awesome tool, though it is not the only one you will ever need. Consider learning every editor you can!

Other Tutorials:


If you find my point of view does not help you, or that the tutorial is not comprehensive enough for your tastes please consider other vim learning sites.

I have only tried to contribute, not to dominate or displace other works.

There are many hundreds of them (a constantly changing list), but here are a few I dug up for you:

• The official vimtutor - just type it from the command line after installing vim. 
• Vimcasts has video tutorials
• YoLinux has a nice tutuorial with primitive formatting
• The Geek Stuff has a list of tutorials
• Net Tuts has a list of tutorials 
• Viemu has visual cheatsheets, and tutorials based on them