Book Overview & Buying
Table Of Contents
Feedback & Rating

Mastering Vim

By : Osipov

4.4 (9)

Buy this Book

Mastering Vim

4.4 (9)

By: Osipov

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Getting Started

Technical requirements

Let’s start a conversation (about modal interfaces)

Installation

Vanilla Vim vs gVim

Configuring Vim with your .vimrc

Common operations (or how to exit Vim)

Moving around: talk to your editor

Making simple edits in insert mode

Persistent undo and repeat

Read the Vim manual using :help

Summary

Advanced Editing and Navigation

Technical requirements

Installing plugins

Organizing workspace

Navigating file trees

Navigating text

Copying and pasting with registers

Summary

Follow the Leader - Plugin Management

Technical requirements

Managing plugins

Deeper dive into modes

Remapping commands

The leader key

Configuring plugins

Summary

Understanding the Text

Technical requirements

Code autocomplete

Navigating the code base with tags

Undo tree and Gundo

Summary

Build, Test, and Execute

Technical requirements

Working with version control

Resolving conflicts with vimdiff

tmux, screen, and Vim terminal mode

Building and testing

Summary

Refactoring Code with Regex and Macros

Technical requirements

Search or replace with regular expressions

Recording and playing macros

Using plugins to do the job

Summary

Making Vim Your Own

Technical requirements

Playing with the Vim UI

Keeping track of configuration files

Healthy Vim customization habits

Summary

Transcending the Mundane with Vimscript

Technical requirements

Why Vimscript?

How to execute Vimscript

Learning the syntax

A word about style guides

Let's build a plugin

Neovim plugin highlights

Neovim is mostly backward compatible with Vim, and supports a huge number of Vim plugins (in fact, Neovim supports every plugin listed in this book except for Powerline).

However, since Neovim natively supports the implementation of asynchronous plugins and adds other developer-friendly features, there's a number of plugins that are only possible due to Neovim. It's worth mentioning that Vim added some of the features unique to Neovim in 8.0 (asynchronous plugin support) and 8.1 (Terminal mode) a few years after Neovim was created.

All of the following plugins (except for NyaoVim) were backported to Vim, but it's worth giving the Neovim community credit for the crea

tion of the plugins. The list is not in any way extensive, and might get out of date pretty quickly. The plugins are rated by popularity as of the time of writing of this book...