Pavel Panchekha

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Vim: The World's Greatest Text Editor

Vim can be downloaded off its website vim.org.

A really good tutorial on Vim, called "A Byte of Vim", is free online. Beyond giving you the basics, "A Byte of Vim" also teaches you some of the more impressive Vim features, and it does so in a way that emphasizes using Vim as it was meant to be used, not in the way other editors are used.

You should relatively quickly become proficient at Vim; estimates I've heard are a week before you magically become significantly more productive with Vim than without (for me, the journey took three days, so that might be an overestimate). Just in case, a technique others suggest is printing out a cheat-sheet of Vim commands and keeping it nearby, forcing yourself to use the Vim shortcuts (as opposed to, say, the menu bar) for the first while. One cheat-sheet I like can be found in the footnotes1 [1 My personally favorite vim cheat sheet is this image, though tuxfiles.org has a more comprehensive HTML version.].

Overall, remember that Vim is not meant to be used like a normal text editor; it is an editor for zooming around text, forming it to your goals. If you treat it like a notepad with features, it will just be a inconvenient notepad with features.

Footnotes:

1

My personally favorite vim cheat sheet is this image, though tuxfiles.org has a more comprehensive HTML version.