Congratulations on the vim decision! While the O’Reilly book (Learning the vi editor) is a good one for the bare basics, there are GREAT docs on the www.vim.org website (just look for the Documentation link on the main page).

The complete vim help is available as a PDF or in HTML format - it’s well-written, comprehensive, and very easy to learn from. IMHO, much much easier than the documentation that comes with emacs.

There’s an online and downloadable version of what’s called “The VIM book”, which is handy as well, but it’s based on vim 5, I believe, Still, it’s useful and begins with a very good tutorial section. On about page 527 is a multi-page quick reference section, which is handy to print out.

Of course, the best way to take the plunge is to run vimtutor from the command line. It takes a “learning by doing” approach and it’s very effective. Highly recommended.

Then you can check out The Vim Outliner (TVO), or an alternative, VimOutliner, which are plugins for outlining. At this point, you’ll get addicted and start scrounging around the vim scripts and tips database on the website…

Have lots of fun! It’s the best text editor out there (ducking from the future flames of emacs users…)

vi/vim and less are the power tools for those who know how to type. I was never able to get into Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.

Thanks for this Bryan. Super-helpful!

Although there’s no way to completely avoid the inevitable “Great War of the Text Editors” headed for this topic, I’ll just pointlessly say that I also have every intention of learning Emacs too! I promise. See? I even have the book.

I would say that this never-ending battle will be an exxxxxxcellent topic to take to the Google Group thread I just created.

And thus, I will actively discourage text editor duelling in this particular alley of Verona. Please.

Not trying to provoke a fued here, but I’m really eager to hear your thoughts about how learning vim differs from learning emacs. I started learning GNU Emacs, found myself wasting too much time on the learning curve, and went back to using BBEdit. I’ve considered trying out Vim, but I’m not sure it would end up any differently.

Ben: My decision-making was fractured and personal, because they both look terrific and very much worth learning. I went with Vim because based on talking to people and reading up on both, the learning curve was a bit less steep for Vim and it seemed to offer more immediate short term benefits for writing (as opposed to programming, etc.), which is how I will use it for now. Also, I just know more people who are using vi, so my tech support circle was greater there. :)

I have a very long list of things I still find baffling (like how to get ispell working more like auto-spell check in OS X), but I’m determined to stick with it til everything clicks.

My sense is, from talking to a lot of people about this, that learning either will eventually pay huge benefits for people who spend a lot of time doing anything with text. There are some paradigmatic bad habits that GUI editors encourage, and either of these editors really forces you to rethink text editing as much more than just a hobbled version of Microsoft Word or Front Page. The automation, scripting, shortcuts and endless benefits of shell manipulation come together in very compelling ways in both apps.

The thing I like best about vi is that I can open a file, do all that I want and never reach for the mouse. When you are editing lots of text files (html, scripts, etc.) like I do, it saves a lot of time.

Now I’m not an Emacs pro, but I’m sure someone who is can acheive similar success. I have the Emacs book on my shelf, but I’ve never really used it since I know vi so well.

Didn’t even remotely desire the potential flamewar a vi vs emacs comparison can provoke :-)

However, it’s very true that once one settles on a “power” text editor like vim or emacs, there’s no looking back. It’s like learning how to play guitar - easy to pick up and strum chords, takes a lifetime to master.

I have played around with emacs - its outlining mode is really powerful. But with TVO (and I guess VimOutliner), vim has a similar capability.

(By the way, Merlin, I met you at O’Reilly’s Mac OS X conference, and we spoke after your joint revelation of Mac power tools with Danny. Good to be speaking with you again!)

Once you get the hang of it, you will LOVE Vim. The best thing I learned is the * command: It searches for the next occurrence of the word under the cursor. Press n to go to the next word or N to go to the previous. Very useful!

does the same thing, only backwards.

Dammit, I was going to write the * tip :)

Then here’s another one: :SEx will split the window and give you a file browser

Wow, I had just added a NextAction to my list to research a good text editor for Windows so I can edit stuff on Mac & Windows in plain text (Notepad mangles the line endings). I log in and find this entry, I never even thought of vi, just kind of skipped my processing. So I bought the book at lunch today to do the play along at home game :-)