Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

Conventional wisdom dictates that Vim has a steep learning curve. I think most Vim users would disagree. Sure, there’s an initial hump, but once you run through vimtutor and learn the basics of what to put in your vimrc, you reach a point where you can actually get work done—a sort of hobbled productivity.

What comes next? The Internet’s answer to this is the “tip”—a recipe for solving a specific problem. You might search for specific tips when your current solution to a problem feels suboptimal, or you might proactively read some of the more popular tips. This strategy works—it’s how I learned, after all—but it’s slow. Learning that * searches for the word under the cursor is helpful, but it hardly helps you ...