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)

Deeper dive into modes

You've already encountered a few different modes Vim operates in, and this section will cover these and the remaining modes in depth. As you have already learned, Vim uses modes to know how to respond to input: a key press in normal mode will produce different results from a key press in insert or command-line mode.

Vim has seven primary modes, and it's important to understand what each mode does in order to comfortably navigate Vim.

Normal mode

This is where you will (and already have) spend most of your time with Vim. You enter normal mode by default when opening Vim, and you can go back to normal mode from other modes by pressing the Esc key (sometimes twice).

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