The Absolute Basics of Vim (It's Not THAT Hard!)

do you spend a lot of time in a text editor are you a writer or a scripter or a programmer whatever it happens to be if you spend a lot of time at a text editor typing you owe it to yourself to learn vim and Vim is not that hard today I'm going to cover the absolute Basics as far as the Vim key bindings and the basic Vim motions so to get started learning Vim the very first thing you need to do is make sure Vim is installed on your system so I'm on an arch based Linux distribution so I could install themm using Pac-Man sudu Pacman capital S Vim or if you wanted to you could install neovim which is a more modern version of Vim or if you happen to be a emac user you could just use emac and just enable evil mode inside emac and it's a a Vim emulation that is very good as far as like 99.9% of everything that is in Vim is also in emac evil mode so you could also do this in emac as well once you have Vim or neovim installed you can open a terminal and run the command vimtutor and this is a little help guide this is basically your very first Vim lesson the Vim tutor is this document that you could go through in about 20 to 30 minutes and it's going to cover all of your basic Vim motion commands basic key bindings basic editing commands so it's a pretty straightforward document to go through you can just read it line by line it's going to tell you some commands to enter just hit those commands but honestly I this themm tutor document it's kind of plain looking for one thing it's not a programming document it's not written in a programming language there's no syntax highlighting so for me I think I'm going to play in a different file I think what I'm going to do for purposes of this video we're just going to play with my bash RC so I'm going to type vm. bashrc here in my home directory and this is my bash config now the very first thing you need to learn when you're using Vim is how to open a document with vim and how to quit out of Vim well opening a document in Vim is easy when you're in the terminal type vim and then the path to some document that you want to edit or if you're creating a new document the path to a new document you want to create right that's easy but now that you've got this document open how do you quit well you type colon Q to quit so colon is the command mode within VM anytime you type colon it expects you to then give it a command such as Q for quit you could actually type the full word quit but Q is a shorthand for quit if I do that it quits me out of Vim if I up Arrow here in the terminal and go back to Vim bashrc I'm back in this document now if you want to save changes to a document and say I've edited a few lines of this document well to save those changes you want to do colon W for right again you could do colon in the full word right but colon W is the shorthand for right if you want to save and quit you could do a colon WQ for right and then quit so if I do colon WQ you know you know I had made no changes but had I made some changes that would have worked now say I make some changes and then try to do a colon q without saving well I'm going to get a warning that I haven't saved the document but if you want to quit without saving the document say you made some changes but then you changed your mind it's like h i don't want those changes Sav let me quit without saving well you can do a colon Q exclamation point and that will quit without saving any changes so let me get back into my b RC let's go over some of the basics with Vim the very first thing you need to know is that Vim is a modal text editor by modal I mean it has modes by default when you open a a document in Vim it is in normal mode and the reason it's called normal mode is this is the mode you're going to be in most of the time normal mode allows you to move around the document with your motion Keys the basic motion keys are HJ k l so H is lift J is down so if I start typing J I go down K is up L is right and just to verify I'll also do H to go back left so h j KL again that is left down up right now your arrow keys do also work when you're in normal mode so you could use the arrow keys to just you know move up and down and left and right that works just fine too many Vim purus will tell you not to use your arrow keys when you're using Vim because it kind of you know confuses you a little bit which it does on a standard keyboard because hjkl are those four arrow motion keys right but they're in a straight line across but on your standard 110 key keyboard your arrow keys are typically in like a a t-shaped upside down T right so you have the up Arrow key above the down arrow key and then left and right out to the side you know it's a very different kind of uh layout on the keyboard your arrow keys compared to hjkl and mentally it will confuse you if you try to go between the two luckily I don't have this problem because I am using these uh split keyboards from Zsa for the most part on all of my machines and I have these set up to where my arrow keys are set up with left down up right all in a straight line so it's very easy for me to either use hjkl or I just move my hand down two lines and the arrow keys are also set up in the same order as hjkl so mentally it's I don't have to learn two different sets of Arrow motions right they're very similar but if you're learning Vim on a standard keyboard try to avoid using the arrow keys for a while because again you really need to get used to hjkl so as I said normal mode you're typically in normal mode when you're in normal mode you're not editing text now if you want to get into insert mode which is the mode where you can then start typing on a keyboard and add text hit I for insert mode and now you could start typing something and to get back into normal mode all you have to do is hit escape on the keyboard and now now you're back in normal mode so hjk andl will work you know as motion keys right where if you were in insert mode hjkl would actually type the characters hjk L on the uh point of the cursor now I didn't actually want to add that new line to my config because this is my actual bash RC my bash config file so I'm going to type youu on the keyboard to undo so anytime you're in normal mode you to undo if I do control r that is a redo and you will use these constantly when you're making changes in a document using Vim so remember U to undo control R to redo so let me u a couple of times to make sure that I haven't made any changes here I'm back at the oldest change you can see here at the bottom Echo area already at the oldest change so we have normal mode which you begin in you have I for insert mode Escape gets you back into normal mode there's also visual mode and there's a couple of different visual modes you need to know you need to know shift V for visual line mode now that I'm in visual line mode when I go down with a j I'm selecting the entire line you can see I'm highlighting these entire lines to copy or delete or whatever it is I'm doing to these lines manipulating the text of these lines in some way let me escape to get out of that so that was visual line mode there's also control V which is visual block mode now this instead of selecting the whole line it just selects whatever I select with the uh cursor point so if I go over a little bit so if I actually use l to go over right you can see I'm selecting a block of text text I'm not selecting the whole lines I'm just selecting that highlighted area so those are the four basic modes you need to know normal mode insert mode and then you have the visual line mode visual block mode and then of course colon is its own mode as well that's command mode where you enter commands such as colon Q to quit colon W to write colon WQ for write and quit while hjkl are nice for moving around by character most of the time you're wanting to move around in much bigger chunks than single characters well there's a couple of things you can do to quickly move around a document the first thing you can do is you can always do GG to get to the top of the document right you could also do capital G shift G to get to the bottom of the document the last line of the document you see I'm on line 256 if I want to go back to line one GG if I want to go back to the last line 256 capital G and if I have a line number in M an exact line number I want to go to for example 10 capital G that takes me to line 10 if I want to go to line 50 50 capital G takes me to line 50 you can also use the HJ KL motions in conjunction with numbers to move for example up and down by a specific number so for example maybe I want to go up 10 lines I could do 10 K and I just moved up 10 lines right if I do 10 J I move back down 10 lines to where I was previously and of course I could also do something like 20 L to move over 20 characters to the right 20h would move me back to the left 20 characters so let me GG to get to the top of the document let's move down to this line here now there's a couple of other very Nifty motions you'll use all the time you'll use the zero and the dollar sign on the keyboard in normal mode what dollar sign is dollar sign takes you to the end of the line right dollar sign end of the line zero takes you to the beginning of the line dollar sign takes you to the end zero takes you back to the beginning now zero and dollar sign are are useful for the most part but sometimes you'll have weird lines for example I'm going to add some blank characters to the beginning and the end of this line now if I do zero to go to the beginning of the line that's great but now I'm on that blank space and maybe every line starts with I don't know two spaces four spaces you'll often encounter this in certain programming documents and you don't want to go to that space you really wanted to go to where the actual line really starts the first nonblank character well you can do this as well what you can do instead of doing zero to go to that first character use the carrot symbol to go to the first nonblank character and similarly instead of doing the dollar sign to go to the very end of the line if if it's a blank character what you could do is you could do Gore to go to the last nonblank character so in summary remember zero is the beginning of the line dollar signs the end of the line carrot symbol is the first nonblank character Gore is the last non-blank character me you to undo those changes another thing you can do to move around quickly in Vim is you can use the braces you can use the uh opening brace and the closing brace the closing brace moves you to the next paragraph the opening brace moves you to the previous paragraph So if I do the closing brace we will go down by paragraph if I do the opening brace we will go back up by paragraph if I want to move down by a half page I can do contrl D to move down by a half page you can see my cursor is always in the same spot I'm moving down by a half Page worth of lines there if I want to go back up by a half page I can do control U so contrl D for down contrl U for up that'll and if I wanted to go all the way to the top GG or all the way to the bottom remember capital G shift G right GG first line capital G last line sometimes you want to search for a specific string of characters in a document you can do that with the slash just hit slash and now type the string you want to search for I want to search for x port and you can see it finds export in several places here and if I hit enter it goes to the first instance and then if I hit in for next it will go to the next instance of export n again will take me to the next export if I do capital N it will take me backwards to the previous export capital N to the previous export now if you know you're going to search for string backwards instead of doing the slash name of string right you could also do a dollar sign name of string so let's do dollar sign export and now what this does when I type in for next it just begins us going backwards and if I do capital N it actually goes reverse so you know you have two different ways to search the slash is the normal way the dollar sign name of string is the backwards way another thing you can do is you can move forwards and backwards by word you will often do this instead of just using hjkl remember H&L move uh left and right by one character but if you just want to move forward and backwards by word you can do W for word so if I just type w I move forward to the first character of each word now W also includes special characters such as the period and the semicolon you know all of those kind of punctuation marks if I do B for back I move back by word I go to the first character of the word except we're going in reverse and again it's going to include special characters such as that semicolon and the period so w forward B for back if you want to go forward and backwards by word but instead of the first character of the word you want to be on the last character of the word you can use e for end of word so e will go forward by end of word and GE will go backwards by the last character of each word and just like w and B included the special characters e and G also include the special characters such as the punctation marks there are versions of these same commands that do ignore the punctuation mark so instead of using WB e g e what you could do is you could use a capitalized version of those for example capital W shift W will take me to the next word but when I get to config period here and I do capital W it skips the period right we we're going to ignore those special punctuation marks so no longer would I stop on semicolon here with the next W it is skip to the beginning of the next word just in this case and capital B does the same thing in Reverse it's going to ignore that semic right we're going to ignore the period with it as well capital E does the same thing we go to the end of the word the end of the word is the period on config period right so before it would uh the regular e if I hit it on config it goes to G and then the next e goes to the period right so G it sees G and period as the end of two separate words where capital E I hit zero on the keyboard and do capital E you know it's going to see the period as the end of the word config period and to uh do GE in reverse and have it also act the same way what you could do let me go forward a word with capital E now let me do g capital E to go back and you see when it goes back it treats the period as the end of this word if I do g capital E again the next time it jumps back to the last character of this this word here bash so WB e g e and then you have capital W capital b capital e g capital E depending on whether you want to ignore the special punctuation marks or not for those of you that are programmers one of the really cool things Vim does is it really helps you manage keeping track of your parentheses braces and brackets because if you want to quickly navigate in between a pair of braces or a pair of brackets or a pair of parentheses all you need to do is I'm on the opening bracket in this case on this line right here if I'm in normal mode all I have to do is hit the percent key and I go to the closing bracket so basically parentheses will always take you to the matching pair for that parentheses brace or bracket if I hit parentheses again I go back to the opening bracket so you know I can quickly switch between the opening and closing of that pair and just to verify that this actually works with parentheses braces and brackets I'm going to get into insert mode and what I'm going to do let's do opening braces parentheses brackets and then some stuff here and then let's do closing brackets parentheses braces then I'll escape to get into normal mode zero to get at the beginning of the line if I hit parentheses while I'm on the brace it will take me to the last brace but let me do H to move back to a character to the closing parenthesis and now when I do parentheses it takes me to the opening parenthesis if I hit L on the keyboard to move over write a character so I'm on the opening brace I hit percent sign you can see it takes me to that closing brace now let me you to undo all of that let's talk about deleting and copying and pasting because those are actions you're going to do all the time in normal mode in Vim let's first talk about deleting an entire line you will often delete entire lines and then go paste them somewhere else for example maybe I want to move this line one line down well I would do DD for delete the entire line DD deletes the entire line ped paste the line right so that's how I move that line basically one spot down really DD and then P what it does it swaps the two lines right because I if I undo you can see undo twice we have this line here that begins with the hashtag this is a commented line then I have a empty line right and if I do DDP I just swap those places is all that is let me you to undo so DD deletes an entire line YY copies an entire line Vim doesn't call copy copy it calls a copy A Yank so why why just yank that line copied that entire line so now if I do p it paste that line on the next line you to undo now let's imagine that you want to delete everything in this document or copy the entire document well if you want to delete the entire document let me GG to go to the very first line we already know D is delete right and we also know capital G takes us to the end of the document takes us to the last line well what if I do D capital G for delete and then g go to the end of the document I just deleted this entire document you to undo what if I wanted to copy the entire document you've probably already guessed why for yank capital G and you can see 256 lines yanked I just copied this entire document if I hit P right now I just pasted this entire document so if I scroll down you will see eventually I'm going to begin again yeah here's the top of my bash RC again so now instead of 256 lines I have 512 lines because I yanked the whole thing I cop the whole thing right and then pasted it again so let me you to undo so D capital G delete the whole document y capital G copy the whole document and of course those only work if you start on the first line of the document what if I was 10 lines down in the document well first you would need to GG before you do your D capital G your y capital G right so if I wanted to yank the entire document but I wasn't on the first line I would simply do a GG y capital G right so you can see how very quickly you you're you'll get the hang of these commands these normal mode commands and it's so powerful especially once you get the hang of using them all the time for example swapping lines I I I do that DDP thing so many times where I have two lines and I want to swap them I want to reverse the order of the lines for example maybe these two lines here DDP right and I just put those lines in different places you to undo and while I'm mostly sticking with the absolute basics of the Vim motions and the Vim key Bings I'm not going to really dive too deeply into command mode other than then uh colon W for right colon Q to quit colon WQ for right and quit I will show you how to yank an entire document instead of having to do GGY capital G the entire document you could actually do this quite a bit easier in command mode because you could do Colin and then you could do percent percent in command mode means the entire document and then give it a y right behind it for yank and you can see that achieves the same effect 256 lines yanked and as you probably guessed if I did a colon and then percent D for delete that would also achieve the same effect for deleting the entire document now let's talk a little bit more about pasting a line let me copy this line here so y y Yanks that line right it copies that line I'm going to go up a couple of lines now if I do a p it's going to paste that copied line on the next line but what if I want to paste that line on the previous line instead of the next line well it may youd undo and instead of P if I do shift p it actually pastes on the previous line so that is how you paste so typically you're pasting to the next line but if you ever want to paste on the previous line capital P paste to the previous line also earlier I mentioned insert mode I gets me into insert mode so I could start typing something right well what happens if you want to get into insert mode but not on the line you're currently on what if you want to get into insert mode on the next line or the previous line well on the next line you just hit o o takes you to the next line and automatically gets you into insert mode and if let me escape to get back into normal mode and if I do capital O that gets me into insert mode on the previous line that I was on so now I could do this is a another line of course I misspelled all that let me you to undo so those are very useful insert mode commands remember I always get you into insert mode on that line o always gets you into insert mode on the next line capital O always gets you into insert mode on the previous line and one other thing sometimes you want to get into insert mode but you want to get into insert mode at the very end of the line that you're currently on Capital a gets you into insert mode at the very end of the line Escape let me undo all of that now rarely are you wan to delete or copy an entire document more often you're deleting or copying entire lines but much more often you're deleting or copying just words or sometimes even single characters let's talk about deleting single characters X on the keyboard deletes the character you're currently on so if I hit X right now I just uncommented this line right the hashtag that was under the cursor point it's deleted if I hit X again that space is gone if I hit X again the capital M is gone right let me 3 U to undo three times CU I knew I'd hit x three times right remember you can always type a number before a command to run that command multiple times let's talk about replacing a character so imagine that instead of my bash config right here here I wanted that word to actually be cache I wanted this to say my cache config well the cursor is currently on the B I can do R for replace if I do R and then do c it just replace the B with a c so R name of character is a replace so if I wanted instead of cache I wanted this to be my cast config so I could do RT and it just replaced that H which was under the cursor with a t now let me you to undo a couple of times if you want to delete a word type D for delete and W for word so DW deletes word right DW again deletes word now let me to you to undo that and just like deleting a word is DW yanking a word copying a word is YW for yank word right if I go back a character and hit P you can see I did copy that word so let me undo that so just a quick refresher DD deletes the entire line you undo DW deletes a word you to undo what if I wanted to delete from this character that I'm currently on to the end of the line you've probably already guessed D for delete of course and then remember dollar sign for end of line so D dollar sign deletes everything to the end of the line you to undo what about delete everything from the cursor point to the beginning of the line remember zero is the beginning of the line D zero right deletes everything from the cursor point to the beginning of the line you to undo and of course that works with yank as well if I go to the middle of the line here and I do a y dollar sign I just copied everything from the cursor point to the end of the line if in instead I did y0 I copied everything from the cursor point to the beginning of the line one of the things you often want to do when you delete a word you want to delete a word and replace it with another word so instead of doing DW to delete it and then I to get into insert mode and then type a new word just do all of that in one command because there is a command in Vim for change what change does it deletes whatever characters or section of text you tell it to delete and then it automatically puts you into insert mode so you can type the replacement so for word you can do CW for change word it just deleted that word and now I could do something like Capital ba for my bash config and then escape to get back into normal mode and just like DD deletes an entire line y y Yanks an entire line CC changes an entire line it deletes it puts you into into insert mode so you can then write a new line now for me I'm going to escape to get back into normal mode you to undo a couple of times and just like we could do uh d dollar sign d0 y dollar sign y0 you could also do this with change as well if I go to the first letter of config here and I do a c dollar sign for change everything in this line from the cursor point to the end of the line you know it puts me into insert mode and then I could write the rest of the end of this line let me you to undo that if I want to change from the cursor point to the beginning of the line I would do c0 and it deletes everything from the precursor point to the beginning of the line puts me into insert mode so I can type a new beginning to this line let me you to undo now DW CW YW you know all of those word commands for for example DW deletes a word right DW would delete that word let me you to undo but sometimes you're not exactly on the first character of the word if you're not on the first character of the word say I'm on the second character of the word DW deletes the word but it left the first character because the cursor point was after it so what you want to do if you're in the middle of a word and you want to delete the word you have to diw for delete inside the word so basically if I'm in the middle of a word DW is the command to delete the word so and if I same thing with yank if I'm in the middle of a word why I W to yank that word because if I'm in the middle of the word and I just do YW it's only going to yank where the cursor point is to the end of that word sometimes you want to delete or you want to yank a word and you want to include the spaces around it so in that that case what you would do instead of DW to delete inside word you would D aw to delete around the word so it deletes the word and the spaces around it you to undo that you could also do that with yank y a w Yanks around the word and similarly if I was in the middle of this word not and I did a c i w for change inside the word I'm changing the word let me escape you to undo and if I was in the middle of the word and I did c a w for change around the word it also will delete the word and the spaces around it and put me into insert mode so I can you know make the necessary change for those of you programmers if you want a really neat thing you can do again with braces brackets and parentheses what you could do is you could actually delete everything that is inside a pair of braces or brackets or parentheses for example I'm in the middle of these brackets here this is a line and you can see it's wrapped in Brackets well if I delete in side and then the opening bracket I just deleted everything that was in that pair of brackets you to undo if I wanted to delete everything that's in a pair of parentheses I could again just go anywhere inside this and do Di and then the opening parentheses and I deleted that text also I deleted the brackets because the brackets were inside the parentheses you'd undo and one more time let's try this with the braces so I'll do Di and then the opening brace and I deleted uh everything was inside the brackets and the parentheses including the brackets and the parentheses themselves because I deleted everything inside the braces I hope that makes sense but if you're a scripter or programmer obviously these kinds of commands the delete inside braces brackets parentheses you're going to use these all the time the last basic Vim motions I want to show you are F and T So f is go forward till the next character it's basically find the next character so if I do FB it goes goes forward to the next instance of that character B if I do FB again there's not another B in this line but what about how about F FF goes to the next F FF goes to the next F FF goes to that last F and then FF won't do anything from that point now let me hit zero on the key very similar to F is the T command so F what F did remember if I do FG it takes me to the next instance of that character G what T does it takes you to the next instance of G except instead of putting the cursor point on the G it puts the cursor point on the character in front of the G so think of f as find find the G and take the cursor point to it think of t as until with a capital T until right so go till the G but stop the cursor point right in front of it so if I do t g you can see I actually go to the place right before G TG again well there's not another G how about t f goes to the U and stuff and that's as far as it'll go now also in conjunction with the F and T commands you can use semicolon and comma to move forward and back by the next instance of those characters so remember FF you know takes me to the F in config but there's also two other Fs in this line and what I could do instead of doing FF again I could just do the semicolon and it will take me to the next F semicolon again will take me to the next F comma would take me back to the previous F comma again would take me back to the previous F and again that works with f it also works with t if I go to the beginning of this line and do TF and then the semicolon again will take me to the next F but remember T always takes you to the cursor point on the character right before that particular character you were searching for and the comma once again will take me in Reverse except when you do it in reverse with a T it's actually the character right after cuz again it goes in in reverse all the way to F but it's not going to stop on F it's going to go a character right after it in this case because we're going in reverse so I think we covered really all of the basics as far as your basic motion Keys you how to move around a document inm the basic editing as far as deleting copying which is yanking pasting we even covered a little bit of command mode but you know really the VM motion Keys they're not that hard to learn once you know the absolute basic Motions like I showed you today I mean really what I covered on camera on this one video that's like 95% of everything you'll do in Vim there's really not much more to learn there's still some stuff to learn but you can get by in Vim just fine if you know exactly what I showed you today on camera now before I go I need to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Matt Paul Steve West Artic armor Dragon Commander angry daroff George Lee Matthew methos Nate Aran Paul peace AR door reality for Less red profit rolling Soul as 10 R tools Del waru and abtu and Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at the absolute basics of them would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work support me on patreon subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys