Welcome to Mastering Vim, a book which will teach you to get good with Vim, its plugins, and its ideological successors!
This chapter will establish a foundation for working with Vim. Every tool is built with a particular usage philosophy in mind, and Vim is not an exception. Vim introduces a different way of working with text compared to what most people are used to these days. This chapter focuses on highlighting these differences and establishing a set of healthy editing habits. It will let you approach Vim in a Vim-friendly frame of mind and will ensure you're using the right tools for the job. To make examples concrete, we will be using Vim to create a small Python application throughout this chapter.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Modal versus modeless interfaces, and why is Vim different from other editors
- Installing and updating Vim
- The gVim - the graphical user interface for Vim
- Configuring Vim for working with Python and editing your .vimrc file
- Common file operations: opening, modifying, saving, and closing files
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Moving around: navigating with arrow keys, hjkl, by words, paragraphs, and so on
- Making simple edits to files and combining editing commands with movement commands
- Persistent undo history
- Navigating the built-in Vim manual
