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A Byte of Vim
first Edition
Preview Book

A Byte of Vim

by Swaroop C. H.
Preview Book

"A Byte of Vim" is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor (version 7), even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard.

The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it.

The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful, such as windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer's editor, how to extend Vim with your own plugins, and more.

The original text can be viewed at http://vim.swaroopch.com/

Swaroop C H is currently the engineering manager of the Machine Learning Engineering team at Helpshift (customer service automation). He was previously an early employee at Automatic, acquired by SiriusXM. He has a wide range of experience from co-founding a technology startup, leading projects from inception to market to consulting and working at large and mid-sized companies.

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

All the code/scripts provided in this book is licensed under the 3-clause BSD License unless otherwise noted.

Printed version

Paperback is available on  Lulu.com.

Introduction. Introduction
Introduction.1 - Preface
Introduction.2 - Introduction
Chapter One. Installation
1.1 - Windows
1.2 - Mac OS X
1.3 - Linux / BSD
1.4 - Summary
Chapter Two. First Steps
2.1 - Starting Vim
2.2 - Graphical or Terminal?
2.3 - Introduction to Modes
2.4 - Writing a file
2.5 - Summary
Chapter Three. Modes
3.1 - Types of modes
3.2 - Normal mode
3.3 - How to use the help
3.4 - Insert mode
3.5 - Visual mode
3.6 - Summary
Chapter Four. Typing Skills
4.1 - Home Row Technique
4.2 - Vim graphical keyboard cheat sheet
4.3 - Summary
Chapter Five. Moving Around
5.1 - Move your cursor, the Vim way
5.2 - Words, sentences, paragraphs
5.3 - Make your mark
5.4 - Jump around
5.5 - Parts of the text
5.6 - Summary
Chapter Six. Help
6.1 - The :help command
6.2 - How to read the :help topic
6.3 - The :helpgrep command
6.4 - Quick help
6.5 - Mailing List
6.6 - Summary
Chapter Seven. Editing Basics
7.1 - Reading and writing files
7.2 - Cut, Copy and Paste
7.3 - Marking your territory
7.4 - Time machine using undo/redo
7.5 - A powerful search engine but not a dotcom
7.6 - Summary
Chapter Eight. Multiplicity
8.1 - Multiple Sections using Folds
8.2 - Multiple Buffers
8.3 - Multiple Windows
8.4 - Multiple Tabs
8.5 - Summary
Chapter Nine. Personal Information Management
9.1 - Installing Viki
9.2 - Get Started
9.3 - Markup language
9.4 - Disabling CamelCase
9.5 - Getting Things Done
9.6 - Summary
Chapter Ten. Scripting
10.1 - Macros
10.2 - Basics of Scripting
10.3 - Decisions
10.4 - Data Structures
10.5 - Writing a Vim script
10.6 - Using external programming languages
10.7 - Summary
Chapter Eleven. Plugins
11.1 - Customization using vimrc
11.2 - Global plugin
11.3 - Filetype plugin
Chapter Twelve. Programmers Editor
12.1 - Introduction
12.2 - Simple stuff
12.3 - Jumping around
12.4 - Browsing parts of the code
12.5 - Compiling
12.6 - Easy writing(empty)
12.7 - Omnicompletion
12.8 - Using Snippets
12.9 - Creating Snippets
12.10 - IDE
12.11 - Running code from the text
12.12 - SCM integration
12.13 - More
12.14 - Writing your own plugins
12.15 - Access Databases
12.16 - Summary
Chapter Thirteen. More
13.1 - Introduction
13.2 - Modeline
13.3 - Portable Vim
13.4 - Upgrade plugins
13.5 - Dr.Chip's plugins
13.6 - Blog from Vim
13.7 - Make Firefox work like Vim
13.8 - Bram's talk on the seven habits
13.9 - Contribute to Vim
13.10 - Community
13.11 - Summary
Chapter Fourteen. What Next
14.1 - Introduction
14.2 - Summary
Chapter Fifteen. Feedback
Chapter Sixteen. Charityware
Chapter Seventeen. Colophon
17.1 - About this book
17.2 - Creating this book
17.3 - Inspiration
17.4 - About the author