Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought

After having used Emacs as my primary editor -- indeed as my primary shell -- for forty years, I felt that it's high time I learned more about the vi family of editors than the scant few commands I had learned in order to do minor editing tasks (or, more important: to get out of vi when I'd really rather have been in Emacs). I was motivated to make this change by several factors: (1) while Emacs isn't always available on the Unix-/Linux-like platforms where I do the bulk of my work, vi is omnipresent, (2) although a lot of Emacs commands are in my muscle memory, I've faced the growing concern that Emacs' command language is on the verbose side, being heavy-handed (no pun intended) in its use of prefixes, modifier keys and spelled-out (even with completion) commands, (3) I've become increasingly aware that heavy use of Emacs has led me to depend upon Emacs-isms (e.g. it's interesting methods of completion) that are not available in other environments, and (4) the ever-present differences between an Emacs shell and a normal shell made for repeated mistakes and accommodations.Over the years I've made brief attempts to learn vi, using mostly the man pages and online cheat sheets. While well-intentioned, and even entirely correct, none of these resources helped me to grok vi.This time around, I started by looking for tutorials. I found Drew Neil's book to be appealing based upon a perusal of the sample pages available online. The reasonable price charged by the publisher, "The Pragmatic Bookshelf", was an additional inducement.Over the years I've become jaded by technical books, particularly those dealing with less specialized topics. The formula seems to be: look for a trending software package, find an early adopter who can write, and throw together a book in a hurry. The result is invariably predictable: a book that reveals little more than freely-available documentation, often "adding value" with obscure tweaks and customizations of questionable value."Practical Vim" is different. Author Drew Neil is clearly an experienced Vim user. His task-oriented approach explains not only the "what" of editing with Vim, but also the "why". This is crucial information that one can't learn from a man page, a cheat sheet or a half-baked dead-tree rehash of an online manual. Kudos to Mr. Neil for taking the time and care to share his expertise in a form that actually makes sense, and for sticking mostly to the core of the program rather than relying upon blanket recommendations of a mixed bag of personalizations and add-ons in order to justify the existence of the book.Kudos as well for the useful index and the clean layout of the book.I don't give a lot of five-star product ratings. This book exceeded my expectations and has become an indispensable companion as I learn Vim.

I've been using vi (and later VIM) as my editor of choice since I first started programming on UNIX workstations 25 years ago. The wonderful thing about vi is that memorizing about 30 keystrokes is all you need to edit any text file in existence. The power of VIM is all the other keystrokes that make complicated tasks easy. I thought I knew a lot of those keystrokes, but wow, was I mistaken. This book covers a lot of ground, from simple keystrokes I'd never known about (like "*p to paste a highlighted selection from another X11 window) to editing across large multi-directory source code repositories effortlessly, and everything in between. It's way too much for me to digest in one sitting, or even by attempting to read it from front to back. Learning VIM-fu doesn't work that way, and the author understands that. Instead, the book is organized by major topic Parts and Chapters (like 'Search', 'Macros', 'Substitution', etc.), and those are then broken down into multiple sequentially numbered 'Tips'. The way I digest this book is by practice. When I'm editing and hit a 'how should I do this?' moment, I'll look up the appropriate tip (and almost without fail there is one) and try it out. Slowly but surely, those that I find continually useful soon become muscle memory.As the author of this book notes right up front, VIM is only efficient if you're a touch typist. This is also not a book for teaching yourself VIM--it gets deep fast. As other reviewers rightly note, this is a book for intermediate and above VIM users who want to learn the secrets of the VIM wizards. If ":g/{/ .+1,/}/-1 sort" makes some sense to you, or you would like it to, this is your book.

This book is a good guide to vim aimed at the intermediate user who already has some familiarity with the editor. The examples are extremely explicit which is nice and you can download the text examples which helps you to follow along. The book is aptly named because the author focuses on practical tasks, rather than try to be encyclopedic. In general the book is a good way to boost your vim skill level.Beware that there are some oddities with the text. For example, the copy editor added herself to the byline which is pretty bizarre. The book uses the convention of capital letters for shift combinations, so you see just V instead of Shift-V, where v is unshifted. Also, the editor went nuts with embedded references, so you will see things like "To see how this is done refer to Table 6. Adding stuff to stuff blah blah, on page 46" when the referenced table is actually on the same page and directly below the reference, doh. Another editing oddity is the long-winded "introductions" that start some of the chapters.

I've been a vim user on and off for the past 15 years and started using it heavily again about three years ago. I've always loved finding little tricks on the web to make my vim use more efficient. This book is nicely broken into 100+ such tips that give you very efficient methods of accomplishing everyday common tasks. I guarantee any level of vim user will gain something useful from this book. The past few months I have been going through a tip or two everyday, setting aside 10 minutes or so to practice what I just learned then trying to consciously use the new methods through out the day. My vim speed and intuition have been increasing almost daily which obviously has a nice impact on my daily work. Highly recommend this book to any vim user, whether you just completed vimtutor for the very first time or have been a vim user for years.

A fantastic resource for diving into the world of Vim. This book has helped me get comfortable moving around in Vim and adopting the Vim way. The main block for me going into Vim was I knew it's power but felt a disconnect when trying to 'think like Vim'.The book isn't a front to back read, although the more complex uses of Vim occur to the back of the book. It largely reads as a reference, with different uses of Vim in different situations being clearly explained and demonstrated.Drew uses a notation that is explained in the introductory sections that means you are able to focus on leaning to think like Vim in the approach to a problem without getting stumped by the features you're using.Once you have ran through Vimtutor (Which you should have) you can dip in and out of the book or read a bit each day. Doing that I managed to keep a steady stream of 'eureka!' moments and avoiding common pit falls. Common pitfalls being learning to do what you need and then never seek to improve and using common navigation commands without thinking if there would be a more efficient gesture to use. I fell that abandoning the basic movement keys in my first month with Vim will have only served me well in the future. Learning a habit of routinely asking myself "Is this the best way to do this?"My only other advice would be to use Vim as much as you can whilst learning. The things you will learn from the book stick a lot better when you have solved a problem in your day to day use with Vim.I've skimmed the more complex subjects and although too much for me at this point they appear as clearly laid out as the material I have been putting into practice.

I have been using Vim for 10 years and still learnt a lot from this book. It's not an introductory book. If you're new to Vim, type vimtutor at the command line and follow the tutorial. After a few months of using Vim, reading this book should be very useful.The book intentionally stays focused on out-of-the-box Vim features. There are a few side notes about third-party plugins, just so you know they exist, but what you learn in this book you'll be able to apply on any instance of Vim. It doesn't say a lot about Vim Script either, instead it focuses on interactive usage. This book does one thing and it does it well.This book doesn't just introduce Vim features, which would be pretty useless since Vim documentation is already good at that. Instead it shows you how to use those features efficiently with a good mix of theory and practice. It explains the logic and the intention behind each feature and it presents quite realistic examples based on editing code or prose. One thing that surprised me is that even off-line reading (for example on the train) proved quite fruitful. Of course just reading off-line didn't make me memorize the details of the commands but it was enough to remember the intention and usage patterns. Then, back at work, I was usually able to just use Vim doc to find out the execution details of the patterns that I was introduced to by the book.The author's tone is very casual, without being silly. I remember laughing at loud at a couple of his jokes. It's a very pleasant and relaxing read.If I had one tiny complain it would be that sometimes there are references to other sections of the book using page numbers when those sections actually happen to be on the next page or even on the same page. So I found myself going like "let's see what on that page 42 he's talking about... oh, I'm on page 42 already!", which is a bit odd. I suppose that's not the author's fault though, but rather an editor constraint.

I think the other reviews have said everything. This is THE book to learn how to use vim correctly. Instead of going through every feature one by one it takes an approach of dissecting different situations. Really, this is the right way to do it! Amazing.

The way that the book is structured, by lessons, makes it really enjoyable to read.Plus it is very well written in an informal and enjoyable fashion.It turned me from a curious about vim to a regular vim user.I definitely recommended it and recommended already to everyone wanting to seriously learn vim.

The best thing you can say about the book is that it changes the way you approach Vim. Your head goes "click" and you start t rethink and finally understand some of the principles that make Vim a great text editor, but are completely different from everything else.I think is a must have for everyone using Vim as their main editor, and very interesting to anyone wanting to know most of that weird-but-extremelly-powerful piece of software.I think the book, anyway, is probably not addressed for the novice, as it assumes some knowledge of the tool.