vim Archives - RoseHosting

We’ll show you an ultimate guide to vim. In our previous post about Vim, we’ve talked about some neat tips and tricks usable for more advanced users. In this post, we will talk about getting started with Vim, so this guide is mostly intended for absolute beginners. Usually, when a newbie opens a document with Vim the first ever user experience is nothing but frustrating, as the user has no idea how to do anything and that includes exiting the program as well. So you are getting frustrated like, “What is this?! I am going back to nano, this is not working!” – as you desperately keep pressing CTRL-C or ESC in an attempt to exit the editor but ending up closing and reopening the PuTTY terminal in the end.

Today we will show you several Vim Tips and Tricks. The most common file editor in Linux is Vim. That’s right, you can like it or hate it, but it doesn’t matter. It can be found in every Linux, that is out there. Even if there is no other editor installed in the system, you can still use it in its most basic form, Vi, the program which is its predecessor, written by Bill Joy in 1970 for the UNIX operating systems. Vi and Vim are similar in many ways, with the exception that Vim (VI IMproved) was later developed and adjusted to the more modern Linux systems.

People often ignore Vim and find it frustrating. Most of them, know only how to exit from it, :q!. Those of you that know little about Vim is that when you open a text file you can edit it with :i, and save it with :w or :wq (write to file and exit) or :wq! (! stands for do not prompt for confirmation). One other very common command is just `o` without a colon and when in COMMAND MODE which automatically puts you in INSERT mode and into a new line for writing.