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