Vim crash course

Photo by Daria Kraplak on Unsplash

Real programmers don’t use integrated development environments (IDEs) like Apache NetBeans for Java or JetBrains PyCharm for Python. Real programmers use Vim.

That’s the opinion of some Vim users, anyway. Maybe you don’t hold that opinion, but maybe you still consider it worthwhile to learn how to use Vim, if for no other reason than to know how to finish writing a Git commit message when you forget to use the M option.

Vim is a text editor that is used by lots of programmers to write computer programs, though apparently a lot of them also use Vim for many other purposes for which most other people would turn to a program like Microsoft Word, iWork Pages or Apache OpenOffice Writer.

If I needed to make a flier for a yard sale, I might use Google Docs. But there are probably people who would use Vim for that purpose.

Almost all the programs I’ve mentioned so far are “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG). Vim is not like that, it’s not WYSIWYG.

To make selected text bold in Microsoft Word, for example, you either click a B button or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-B or Command-B, and then you see the text you selected change to boldface.

In Vim, you don’t do that. The closest you can get to that in Vim is that you mark up some text as bold, save the file and then use some other program…