Venturing into Vim – Week 2: Premium Video
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Venturing into Vim – Week 2: Premium Video

on Sep 22nd 2010 with 33 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Topic: Vim Editor
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Availability: Premium Exclusive
Download Source Files

Some say it’s a decade-old piece of junk; others widely consider it to be the best code editor available. I’m on a quest to find out for myself. So, for four weeks (and four screencasts to track my progress), I will use nothing but Vim.

Along the way, if you choose to join me, I’ll share what I’ve learned, what frustrated me, and everything that falls in between. If you’ve been hoping to venture into Vim territory, there’s no better time to do so! Let’s do it together. Gain access to this screencast series, as well as many others by becoming a Premium member.

Week 2

In this next episode, we learn about:

  • buffers
  • tabs and windows
  • mappings and abbreviations
  • the best plugins available, and how to use them
  • more keyboard shortcuts

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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. I'm incredibly passionate about modern software development, and am the author of Laravel Testing Decoded! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.  

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  • http://laroouse.com esranull

    her zaman para isityorsunuz bizden paragozler

  • eric

    Just to prove I am not a complete whiner(See prior tutorial comments). Just downloaded Vim and I am going to watch your tut.

    Thanks again Jeff!

  • http://www.caiapps.com Adam

    I has been using VIM for about 4-5 years, but I think I am still far from being a vim expert, because I have never got into advanced Vim features. Don’t laugh at me, I don’t even get used to HJKL keys, and still use arrow keys to move the cursor.

    Maybe it’s right time to learn more … Thanks Jeff!

  • Anders

    I would like to see this – but I’m venturing into week 2 with a premium account that doesn’t work. When I sign in I’m not redirected to the members area but to the same page I’m visiting.

    • Anders

      Ok – it does work, a new layout apparently. Sorry!!!

  • http://www.pintabona.org Fefo

    Thanx Jeffrey for your tuts!.
    Within VIM, once you searched for something and want to stop the highlighting, you just search for nothing; ie: press / and return.
    That does it for me.

    Cheers

    Fernando P

  • yauuik

    Great video but a little slower for explanations will be appreciated. sometime, It’s really hard to follow you jeff

  • http://www.cabbagetreesolutions.com Gina

    Hey thanks for the video. This is very useful stuff for me.

  • Prock

    Sign-up for a premium account just for these tuts. Thanks!

  • Erik

    I’m following this with quite a bit of interest — I’ve tried gVim and vim, and they just didn’t appeal to me. The amount of evangelism vim gets from its fans has always convinced me there must be something there.

    But really, how much coding time is spent typing? I don’t know about anyone else but I spend a lot more time thinking and planning then I do editing code. The idea of not having a graphical code explorer also hurts my head a bit.

    At the end of your thirty days, I’d really like to hear if you feel it increases your productivity or if you feel there’s no gain.

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Definitely – I’ll keep you posted. I’m not 100% a convert yet. So, I very well might switch back…but I hope not.

  • Brandon

    I was forced to use Vim for a while in school, and hated every minute of it. But to each their own, I suppose.

    And with things like zen coding and text replacement, my workflow in normal text editors is pretty speedy already.

  • http://febriansyah.biz febri

    for *anoying* highlights search, adding this line to .vimrc file will do the job
    set nohlsearch

  • Tim Shortt

    I leave search highlighting on (set hlsearch in vimrc). I remove the highlighting with the following:

    In vimrc:

    ” Press space bar to turn off search highlighting and clear any message displayed
    nnoremap <silent> lt;Spacegt; :nohlsearchlt;Bargt;:echolt;CRgt;

    • Tim Shortt

      ” Press space bar to turn off search highlighting and clear any message displayed
      nnoremap :nohlsearch:echo

  • Tim Shortt

    I’m going to try to add this snippet one more time.

    ” Press space bar to turn off search highlighting and clear any message displayed
    nnoremap <silent> <Space> :nohlsearch<Bar>:echo<CR>

  • http://phillipjacobs.com Phillip Jacobs

    This is ridiculous! VI was created in 76… It’s like you guys have run out of ideas. Next ur going to write about how cobol is the best language ever. I actual pay for this crap but if it keeps up then it’ll be the last time I spend my money on such garbage.

    I used VI for 10 years along with emacs but that was because there wasn’t anything better on unix.

    Here are a few ideas for you: The new Atari is coming out or the Commodore 64 or there’s the really cool Algol .NET that’s coming in 2025. Maybe you could try out edlin – I hear it’s incredible too.

    • Marcin

      Ignorance combined with unwelcomed aggression – let me congratulate you on your style.

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Hey Phillip,

      If you’re unhappy with your subscription, I recommend that you request a refund.

      The difference between Vim and the Commodore 64 (other than the obvious), is that Vim is still actively being actively developed by the community. It’s also widely considered to be the greatest editor on the planet.

      For that matter, people shouldn’t create Windows tutorials, because the OS has been around for well over a decade.

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      P.S. Vi is not Vim.

      • http://phillipjacobs.com Phillip Jacobs

        Quit crying jeffrey and start doing something that is relevant. I’ll complain (when it’s warranted) all I damn well want.

    • http://www.dennismars.com/ dennismars

      Everyone else thinks VIM is relevant. So maybe you are irrelevant.

      I am but a lowly noob, but perhaps you could start phil-tuts.com and show us how its really done?

    • http://www.twitter.com/evilmeteor Jaime

      You truly come off as an imbecile of the worst kind. For starters, the fact that Vi was created in 1976 and still is one of the most used text editors by professionals in the Development and Computer Science is a testament to it’s quality. You have NOT used Vi nor Emacs for 10 years, at least not at their full capacity, because if you really know how to use this tools you would not even dare speak such atrocities of them. As a matter of fact (and this is coming from a Vi user) Emacs is probably the greatest IDE ever, while Vi has probably the most productive and fast cursor movement and regex engine. On top of all that, they have amazing communities which have extended both into well rounded tools with all the features you’ll ever need.

      Saying Vim is not relevant speaks tons of your ignorance, and telling the author to stop crying speaks tons of your unpleasant personality. Not only is your unfamiliarity with the editor obvious, but your cluelessness about the actual relevancy of Vi obvious as well. So many programmers, from longbeards to newschool kids and lots in between, swear by this editors (in my case I have a lot of friends who swear by ‘Joe’, though I’ll just call that Emacs with a cool name) because they truly make you more productive and makes coding lightning fast in comparison to other tools. If you have ever used any of these editors you probably thought “Oh they suck… pressing I to edit test? Madness” and went on your way… To really understand what the fanboisim is about you need to actually know how to use them. Besides, what editor would you recommend? Textmate? Netbeans? Yikes, Eclipse? Give me a break …

  • http://css.studiomohawk.com Yuya Saito

    Hello, Jeff.

    First of all, thanks for the great tutorial, this tutorial alone get me into premium and it sure worth it.

    I have one question, you’ve changed mapping of zencoding.vim, I’ve been trying to do this but no luck.
    I wonder if you could help me on this.

    Thanks.

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Can you paste in what code you have in your vimrc file?

      • http://css.studiomohawk.com/ Yuya Saito

        Hello,

        http://pastebin.com/c4mpC13P

        This is my vimrc file.

        Since I have no idea how to put mapping for zencoding,
        I haven’t write it yet.

        Thanks.

  • http://ingo-fahrentholz.com Ingo Fahrentholz

    Hi, can anyone help me ? I want to use VIM witch CVS. I have tried two plugins 1. vcscommand 2. cvsmenu
    Unfortunately I can’t figger out how to use it. It would be great if anyone can help me.

  • vaff

    I havn’t been able to watch the video yet … and been trying since it got released, starting to feel that premium was a waste :/

    • http://ingo-fahrentholz.com Ingo Fahrentholz

      Hi Vaff,
      If you have trouble to connect your premium account, I had the same problem. I can only suggest you to write a support ticket.. the support is super fast.
      From the support team I’ve got a link: http://tutsplus.com/amember/login.php

      Try to connect your prem. account there.. in my case it worked.

      Greetz

  • vaff

    I’m logged in … and got access to the membersarea, I just can’t watch the video … server seams overloaded.

  • http://www.dennismars.com dennismars

    I keep trying to unzip plugins in to the ~/.vim directory but it always says :

    caution: filename not matched: Users/DP/.vim/

    I’m using the shell command in vim and entering -> unzip surround.zip ~/.vim
    I’ve also tried -> unzip ‘surround.zip’ ~/.vim/
    And I’ve tried -> unzip surround.zip ~/.vim/

    I end up doing it manually and it works, but do you know what’s going on? If I manually unzip it and traverse the folders through the shell command it works. For example, if my working directory is the Desktop :

    cd surround
    cd plugin
    cp surround.vim ~/.vim/plugin
    cd ..
    cd doc
    cp surround.txt ~/.vim/doc/

    It works, but obviously I don’t want to do all that. Any idea what’s going on?

  • http://twitter.com/jontyy John

    Hi, Just started watching these Venturing into Vim screencasts and I am starting to get the hang of it.

    Anyway I couldnt get snipmate to work with PHP and HTML so after googling about I found that someone left a comment on how to do it: http://www.catonmat.net/c/4350

    In short add the following to the vimrc file:

    “mix php and html for snipmate
    au BufRead,BufNewFile *.php set filetype=php.html

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