Vim Reference Guide

Vim Reference Guide is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. It has more in common with cheatsheets than a typical text book. Topics like Regular Expressions and Macros have more detailed explanations and examples due to their complexity. Visit https://youtu.be/SyQe6zzOGZ0 for a short video about the book.

See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.

📹 I'm currently creating short 1-10 minute videos highlighting handy Vim features.

See also my curated list on Vim for beginner to advanced level learning resources.

E-book

• You can purchase the book using these links:
  • https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/vim_reference_guide
  • https://leanpub.com/vim_reference_guide
• You can also get the book as part of these bundles:
  • Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex
  • All books bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
    • Includes all my programming books
• See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for list of other books

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters

The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdf/epub from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.

For web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/vim_reference/

Testimonials

Got several suggestions and feedback when my submission about this book reached the front page of Hacker News.

Great job on this! — rendall

Hi, great work releasing this! Trying to explain vim concisely is always an interesting challenge and I had a great time reading your attempt in this book. I always find it really interesting on how people try to group certain vim functions in a way that makes sense to people that don't use vim. I think you cover that idea pretty well in your 'Vim philosophy and features' section whilst not making it overly abstract and keeping it relatable. — doix

Neat stuff! One piece of feedback is that I would include "+p and "+yy in the copy and paste section. — mrpotato

I learnt regular expression by reading your books, thank you for the great work. — LamJH

A comment from another Hacker News thread:

I stumbled upon your vi post a few days ago, really like the style. Keep it up!

Feedback and Contributing

Open an issue if you spot any typo/errors.

⚠️ ⚠️ Please DO NOT submit pull requests. Main reason being any modification requires changes in multiple places.

I'd also highly appreciate your feedback about the book.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. Insert mode
4. Normal mode
5. Command-line mode
6. Visual mode
7. Regular Expressions
8. Macro
9. Customizing Vim
10. CLI options

Acknowledgements

• Vim help files — user and reference manuals
• /r/vim/ and vi.stackexchange — helpful forums
• canva — cover image
• Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
• oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner for optimizing images
• Rodrigo Girão Serrão for feedback and suggestions
• Andy for cover image suggestions
• Inkscape for favicon
• mdBook — for web version of the book
  • mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each page
  • minify-html — for minifying html files
  • MDN: kbd — CSS for <kbd> tag

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file