A LIttle Reassurance First

Nobody knows all of Vim.

There is enough in Vim's command system that we all use it in our own idiosyncratic way.

 Luckily, you don't have to know it all. You only need to know how to do your own work.

Because there is so much capability in this program, you will be learning new tricks as long as you continue to use it. The secret is to not settle for crummy ways of doing work.

Vim has word completion, and undo, and shortcuts, and abbreviations, and keyboard customization, and macros, and scripts. You can turn this into *your* editor for *your* environment. That's cool, but it's also reassuring to know that you can probably be much more productive than you are without touching any of those advanced features.

As Bram Moolenaar (Vim's primary author) says, the best way to learn Vim is to use it and ask questions. This little tutorial is full of questions you might not have thought to ask. That's the main value I can give you.

Vim has a built-in tutorial. You might want to try it, especially if you don't like my tutorial. All you have to do is type "vimtutor" at the command line. It is a very nice tutorial, and is rather complete (compared to mine, which is fairly nice but not very complete at all).

Finally, please consider gvim (mvim on mac). It will make your experience much more pleasant. If you only have Vim, then you can still use it and learn, but gvim has a much nicer look, lets you use your mouse and scroll wheel, and has menus and icons for those of you who are used to such things.

Also, gvim and mvim tend to launch in the background, which is handy when you need your terminal for other things (such as running a continual test tool: gvim test.py && sniffer).