Monday, November 16, 2020

Vimtutor - Your first Vim tutorial

Got Vim installed and excited to your first steps? Understand how to run your first Vim tutorial

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

So, now that you installed Vim on your Mac, Windows or Linux workstation, and that you learned how to get started with Vim, let's review the very first thing you should do to get acquainted with Vim: doing your first Vim tutorial.

Running Vimtutor

If you installed Vim via your package manager or from the official installer, vimtutor is already available by default. So go ahead and start it by typing on your terminal:

vimtutor

This is what you should see:

What next? Keep reading and follow the instructions as you read them.

Frequent Questions

What's Vimtutor?

Vimtutor is a tutorial about Vim, using Vim and made by the Vim developers. It contains all the basics you should know about Vim, much more than we'd be able to cover in an article like this.

Why Vimtutor?

And why should one run vimtutor? Because It will teach you all the basics you should know about Vim. Plus, it works in chapters and you'll be able to stop, resume, repeat - all at your own pace.

How long it takes to complete the tutorial?

The approximate time required to complete the tutor is 25-30 minutes, depending upon how much time is you want to spend learning things and playing with other stuff.

What will I learn?

Just enough to understand Vim's basics, the most popular features and commands.

What are the recommended next steps?

Honestly? Do it again and again, until you get comfortable with the terms and commands. Next, we recommend you reading Vim's man page and playing with the :help command.

Conclusion

On this post we reviewed the basics after the very basics of Vim: running vimtutor. Vimtutor is a tutorial about Vim, using Vim and made by the Vim developers. It contains all the basics you should know about Vim, much more than we'd be able to cover in an article like this. What's next? Keep tuned.