Learning the vi editor

What Hacker News says

1. Anthony-GMar 2017
   I’m always surprised at the number of people who recommend mapping `,` as their Leader key; it’s almost as useful as its counterpart, `;`. I suspect that such people never learned vanilla Vi and use `f`, `t` and related line movement commands.

   When I learned Vim, I started with the `vimtutor` tutorial. At the end of the tutorial, it suggests Learning the Vi Editor - by Linda Lamb (O’Reilly)[1] for further reading. I found this book to be excellent for providing a solid grounding on Vi – and its descendants such as Vim. For a while, I constrained myself to using Vim in Vi-compatibilty mode before using the many wonderful features provided by Vim.

   I try to keep my vimrc as lean as possible so that I’m not reliant on having it available (even though I have it in a Git repository on my VPS) and it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started adding plugins to it (Syntastic and Unicycle).

   [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565924260.do

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2. currysausageJul 2014
   Unless you have a specific reason not to, you definitely should look at vi if you find Emacs' learning curve frustrating. Adhering to the Unix philosophy, vi lets you combine simple commands to achieve more complex goals, which makes the learning curve way more pleasant. For example, if you know how to jump to the next occurence of character x (fx), you already know how to delete from cursor to character x (dfx).

   Vim is a very feature-rich editor, which can be distracting while learning the more basic steps. I started with nvi (the vi clone that ships with OpenBSD). Used copys of the 6th edition of O'Reilly's "Learning the vi Editor" (1998) are available practically for free. You don't have to read every single sentence ("remember that you must press ENTER to tell Unix that you are finished issuing your command"), but I found the structure very sensible.

   If you don't think distraction is a problem for you, start with Vim and try the vimtutor.

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3. chongliAug 2013
   The best I can recommend is Learning the vi Editor by O'Reilly. This book will really teach you to understand the command languages of ex and vi (and how they interact). Once you've mastered that, vim will make a lot more sense as it's just a gigantic pile of extra stuff built around that core functionality.
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4. joshuaxlsJul 2008
   I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much everything you've said here. There is no magic "Vim cheat sheet" for new Vim users. To understand the power of Vim, you have to understand the power of its parts. It reminds me of playing with K'NEX as a kid: you either learn how to build magnificent things by learning how pieces combine to form powerful designs, or you blindly follow the built-in diagrams for prefabricated creations (not really understanding how they came to be) and then dump it a few days later out of boredom.

   That said, I up-voted this submission solely because it's showing off Vim. That's what I try to do with the programmers I meet -- evangelize about Vim.

   I'll never forget the first time I saw an ancient Vim user hacking away at code. It seriously blew me away, and I knew that I had to learn it. Via a combination of :help and O'Reilly's "Learning the Vi Editor", I learned. Four years later (and that's young for a Vim user), I'll never look back.

   Point being: you can't learn via a cheat sheet. Dive into Vim, starting from the basics.

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5. eesmithMay 2023
   The source, https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreil... , is rather more interesting.

   What was the first animal book? The Xlib reference manual (1990) does not use it. https://archive.org/details/xlibrefmanv115ed02nyemiss

   Programming Perl (1991) used a camel. https://archive.org/details/programmingperl000wall

   Ahh, Learning the vi Editor (1990) had an animal. https://archive.org/details/learningvieditor00lamb_0

   So did Using C on the UNIX system : a guide to system programming (1989), https://archive.org/details/usingconunixsyst00curr . With a lion.

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6. westurnerOct 2022
   A document with notes on the software tool https://westurner.github.io/tools/#vim :

   - [x] SpaceVim, SpaceMacs

   - [ ] awesome-vim > Learning Vim https://github.com/akrawchyk/awesome-vim#learning-vim

   - [x] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/vim/

   - [ ]

     :help help
     :h help
     :h usr_toc.txt
     :help noautoindent
   

   - [ ] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_Editor/Vim/Mod... :

     :help Command-line-mode
     :help Ex-mode
   

   - [ ] my dotvim with regexable comments: https://github.com/westurner/dotvim/blob/master/vimrc
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