Book Image

Mastering Vim

By : Ruslan Osipov
Book Image

Mastering Vim

By: Ruslan Osipov

Overview of this book

Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript. By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Technical requirements

Throughout this chapter we will be writing a basic Python application. You don't have to download any code to follow along with this chapter as we'll be creating files from scratch. However, if you ever get lost and need more guidance, you can view the resulting code on GitHub:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Vim/tree/master/Chapter01

We will be using Vim to primarily write Python code throughout this book, and it is assumed that the reader is somewhat familiar with the language. Examples assume you're using Python 3 syntax.

If you must live in the past, you can convert Python 3 examples to Python 2 code by changing the print() command syntax. Change all of print('Woof!') to print 'Woof!' to make the code run in Python 2.
We will also be creating and modifying Vim configuration, which is stored in a .vimrc file. The resulting .vimrc file is available from the previously mentioned GitHub link.