Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 8th Edition

Chapter 17. Epilogue

If you’ve made it to here, we thank you for your patience and interest.

We’ve come a long way since the beginning of this book. We started with the basics—“What are text editors and text editing?”—and progressed through understanding vi command mode and the underlying ex editor, including regular expressions and the powerful command language underlying vi and Vim.

From there we did a deep dive into just some of Vim’s many features, which make Vim at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the original vi. Vim is great at editing regular text (we composed this book in it), but it really shines as a programmer’s editor.

Finally, we looked at how Vim’s extensibility allows you to build it into a full-fledged IDE, as well as at how vi’s command-driven editing model can be found in other tools.

If and as long as you manage textual information from a keyboard, we think it well worth your time to learn Vim. Much as touch-typing is more efficient than hunt-and-peck typing, Vim is a quantum level better at text and program editing than any mouse-driven GUI editor.

Enjoy!