I can’t type and I don’t know how to get out of it. I just opened my terminal and typed vi and hit return key. Feel free to jump ship before you start sailing on this beautiful journey with VI(m). But once I was hooked to Vim, I just never really had any interest in emacs (may be because of the installation required). I know, I know, I can hear some of you yelling “Emacs! Emacs!” I get it.

The editor will appear in front of you!Īnother thing that appealed to me is the ability to work without a mouse and without wasting any productive time on touchpad or getting a mouse for laptop.

Log in to any (non-windows) machine from any terminal and you can literally get an editor by typing *vi* with your eyes closed. The thing that appealed most to me when I started as a beginner was the ubiquity of Vim. The majority of the articles on Vim refer to the learning *curve* as a learning *wall*, but hey, there’s some positivity: look at the other side of the wall!įor beginners, it’s literally a wall since they have never done anything like this before to use an editor on command line. Well, haters gonna hate ? However, according to me, the image that somewhat gives a proper representation of Vim is: Courtesy: I have heard funny stories and seen funny images about learning curve of Vim. Absolutely true and I’m sure you will appreciate it once you get used to the editor and the power it provides. There are also some great books and articles that tell you that there is a philosophy behind the way Vim works and that the commands in VI/Vim are meant to be combined. If you’re really in the mood of theoretical perfection learning mode, feel free to read whatever helps in wikibooks. Most of intro articles on Vim begin with modes of Vim, inserting, saving and exit. NOTE: If you know the basics, click here to scroll past them What’s your deal here compared to tons of other articles on Vim? So, let’s assume you are completely new to this whole game and start from just what we need as basics (without history/boring theory). You might have just heard that Linux distributions ship with a default command-line text editor called Vim, and may want to just give it a try. Oh sure! Before I copy paste a few commands from a cheatsheet, I am going to make a bold assumption: you wouldn’t be reading this if you wanted a cheatsheet and you already knew Vim basics. Can you cover some basics before you start rambling about these new things? Since I started using Vim in 2016, I’ve discovered several lesser-known features that Vim offers out of the box without any plugins.

Exciting emacs text editor