vim

Name

vim - Vi IMproved, a programmer’s text editor

Purpose

CLI for editing text files. Provides various modes and actions that allow the user to navigate, search and transform text files manually, or automatically.

Usage

  • create new files in terminal
  • edit files in terminal
  • read files in terminal

Setup

You have likely installed vim already, if you have not you can with apt:

sudo apt install vim

vim Modes

vim has a few different modes:

Basic Modes:

  • Normal
  • Visual
  • Select
  • Insert
  • Command-line
  • Ex

Additional Modes:

  • Operator-pending
  • Replace
  • Virtual Replace
  • Insert Normal
  • Insert Visual
  • Insert Select
Bonus

The listed modes can be found in the Vim Docs / vim-modes .

This curriculum will only utilize the following modes:

  • Normal
  • Insert
  • Command Line Mode via Normal Mode

Our goal is to learn how to create, edit, and read files from the terminal using vim.