Name: Modern Vim
ISBN: 9781680502626

Modern Vim

Turn Vim into a full-blown development environment using Vim 8's new features and this sequel to the beloved bestseller Practical Vim. Integrate your editor with tools for building, testing, linting, indexing, and searching your codebase. Discover the future of Vim with Neovim: a fork of Vim that includes a built-in terminal emulator that will transform your workflow. Whether you choose to switch to Neovim or stick with Vim 8, you'll be a better developer. A serious tool for programmers and web developers, no other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency. Make Vim the centerpiece of a Unix-based IDE as you discover new ways to work with Vim 8 and Neovim in more than 20 hands-on tips. Execute tasks asynchronously, allowing you to continue in Vim while linting, grepping, building a project, or running a test suite. Install plugins to be loaded on startup - or on-demand when you need them - with Vim 8's new package support. Save and restore sessions, enabling you to quit Vim and restart again while preserving your window layout and undo history. Use Neovim as a drop-in replacement for Vim - it supports all of the features Vim 8 offers and more, including an integrated terminal that lets you quickly perform interactive commands. And if you enjoy using tmux and Vim together, you'll love Neovim's terminal emulator, which lets you run an interactive shell in a buffer.

What Hacker News says

rigmaroleMar 2026

Drew Neil‘s books, Practical Vim and Modern Vim are excellent.

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skydhashFeb 2026

There are the Practical Vim[0] and Modern Vim[1] by D. Neil

And the VimL Primer[2] by B. Klein

But Vim is a whole culture that starts with ed(1), the standard editor. You do edit based on line numbers and regex addressing and commands. Then there was ex(1) that added more features. vi(1) added a `visual` mode to ex(1), and some commands can now be done in relation to the position of the cursor. Vim is the improved version of vi(1), a lot more commands and a scripting language.

The plugin system is similar to everything that was unix at that time, relying on a variable like $PATH. Any path added to that variable (runtimepath for vim), should follow some patterns for subdirectories and the file will be loaded according to a certain logic. Plugin managers actually manage that variable and do a few things aside (isolating plugins, downloading from forges,...)

[0]: https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...

[1]: https://pragprog.com/titles/modvim/modern-vim/

[2]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-viml-primer/9781680...

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JNRoweFeb 2021

Drew Neil's Modern Vim is also wonderful. While it introduces a lot of plugins in an attempt to modernize the experience, it also includes some excellent notes on standard features(qf/sessions/etc).

I'll also note it covers both vim and neovim, with nice little asides explaining the differences where they matter.

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JNRoweDec 2020

Drew Neil's awesome vimcasts¹ are available, while no longer getting updates they'll still be pretty useful. Also a /big/ fan of his Modern Vim book², even after literal years of vim use I still found a bunch of new-to-me information inside it.

¹ http://vimcasts.org/episodes

² http://vimcasts.org/blog/2018/05/modern-vim-now-shipping/

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RMPRMay 2020

> I still learn many great things from books like Practical Vim by Drew Neil

You should also check out "Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim" from the same author.

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bhaakJan 2020

In my experience, there are people that like building their development from the bottom up and others like going from top down.

It's perfectly fine to get a full featured IDE. If you miss the vi stuff, most IDEs nowadays have pretty good vim emulations (and thanks to to neovim, many have even perfect vim emulations).

Nevertheless, for an intro into vim plugin management, a good book is "Modern Vim by Drew Neil".

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