Mastering Vim

Opening files

First, start your favorite Command Prompt (Terminal in Linux and macOS, Cygwin in Windows). We'll be working on a very basic Python application. For simplicity's sake, let's make a simple square root calculator. Run the following command:

$ vim animal_farm.py

If you're using gVim—you can open a file by going into a File menu and choosing Open. Sometimes graphical interface is exactly what you need!

This opens a file named animal_farm.py. If the file existed, you'd see its contents here, but since it doesn't, we're greeted by an empty screen, as shown in the following example:

You can tell that the file doesn't exist by the