Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought 1st Edition

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.

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.

This is a great and necessary book for anyone who wants to use VIM for serious programming.I have used Vim for a while, but only for very basic editing. When I started programming in Python, I used Pycharm as an IDE. However, once you get more sophisticated, such GUI based IDEs suddenly become quite restrictive and even error prone. So a year later I remembered my old friend Vim, but after following the only manuals on how to set up a proper Python environment, I still missed a lot of Pycharm's features.Enter Practical Vim. This book is gold form page 1 onwards. Even the little hint to actually read the forgotten manual was a big plus. And then it got better... highly recommended for anyone who is serious about working in Vim.