Vim text editor how to#
Vim text editor install#

There are four of them: e:Īpply from the position of the cursor to the end of the current word.

Vim text editor how to#

You have to know how to select the text that you desire to change. The following tasks that are writing and editing text require the knowledge of reference to the text. To exit INSERT mode and enter NORMAL mode, press ESC. To exit NORMAL mode and enter INSERT mode, press I. You will see that it is in insert mode, as a string of “– INSERT –” will appear at the bottom of the window. This will make Vim go into the Insert mode. You can still navigate through the data, however. In the Normal mode, you can enter various commands to the file. Why is that? The reason is that you are still in what is called the ‘Normal’ mode. Starting WritingĪfter opening the file, if you start typing in random characters, you will notice that they are not getting written. What you just wrote is a command! Almost all the commands that don’t have to do with a specific character, word, or line begin with the ‘:’ character. First, just open Vim in the terminal: vimĪs you start typing, you will notice that whatever you are writing starts to appear on the bottom of the window. This means that you can open files in the same way. If a file with the same name already exists, it will be opened.

For creating a file, all you have to do is go to the location where you want the data to be and enter this command. The first part of a text file is opening/creating it. Whatever I mention here, I probably mean to do it in the terminal. An important thing to remember is that everything is done through the terminal. Along the way, I will tell you how to get various things done so that we can learn how to work with Vim efficiently. Now, to explain how to use Vim, we are going to work through a text file that we need to create.

Vim text editor install#

If you don’t, you can install it with the following commands: Ubuntu/Debian and their derivatives sudo apt install vim Fedora sudo dnf install vim Usage If you see information about Vim in the terminal, you have it on your system. There is a chance that your system may not have Vim installed. VIM Installation and Everything You Need to Know It is an editor that was built in the ’80s, so I need not say that it performs well no matter what hardware you have, or on what device you are, as long as it supports Vim. The highlighting and indentation of most common languages are built-in. Due to this, Vim has support for almost every language that you could think of. Vim has been the editor of the preference of a lot of users for long years. Might be a fancy tree-structured file browser, or some more productivity hacks. Vim has a plethora of plugins for many different purposes. For example, I was recently working on a LaTeX document, and using the Vim-LaTeX plugin helped a lot. Plugins are intended to make the work more comfortable, no matter what language you are working with. Thanks to its so many years of existence, the Vim user community has developed a lot of plugins for it to make the workflow even smoother. We will discuss some of these shortcuts is much more detail later on. Since Vim is command-line based, there is no involvement of a mouse, and getting familiar with the key bindings is the essence of Vim.

There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts for almost everything that you would have to do, and it makes your productivity go to a uniquely higher level. Some distinct and well-implemented features of Vim are: Keyboard Shortcuts Vim is known to be one of the most reliable text editors, and while it was originally written for Amiga, it has been made cross-platform to every operating system. The name ‘Vim’ is a combination of the words ‘Vi Improved.’ Vi was a text editor in the original Unix system.