In these videos we cover the basics. If you’re just getting started or think you may be missing some of the basic ideas behind Vim, these videos are for you. They’re hosted at Vimeo but you can also watch them here if you wish. The quality may be a bit better over at Vimeo, though.

On this page, you should find that there is some better organization and a decent set of notes you can pick up afterwards.

• Welcome to Vim
• Basic Movement (Screencast 1)
• Basic Movement (Screencast 2)
• Basic Movement (Screencast 3)
• Basic Editing (Screencast 1)
• Basic Editing (Screencast 2)
• Working with Many Files (Screencast 1)
• Working with Many Files (Screencast 2)
• Working with Many Files (Screencast 3)
• How to use the Help System

Welcome to Vim

NOTE: You should really see it straight from Vimeo at Welcome to Vim as the embedded video doesn’t look all that great and at Vimeo there is a decent set of hyperlinks that let you index the video and fast-forward to the major topics.

What we’ll cover

Not much :) This is a Vim showcase to run through some of the most very basic, course, obvious Vim stuff just to show it off and let complete newbies see what’s what.

Basic Movement (Screencast 1)

See it straight from Vimeo at Basic Movement (Screencast 1).

What we’ll cover

Slow movement – Character-wise movements with the home keys: h, j, k and l. The lesson here: DON’T use the arrow keys.

Line terminus – Beginning of line and end of line movements: 0 and $.

The different types of “words”

• words – represent a sequence of characters in the 'iskeyword' class.
• WORDs – represent a sequence of characters separated by whitespace.
• Run :help word and :help WORD

Forward word movement – We learn to move foward to the next WORD and word both to the beginning of words and the end of words. Commands are w, W, e and E.

Backward word movement – And we learn to move backward to the previous WORD and word both to the beginning of words and the end of words. Commands are b, B, ge and gE.

“To the Character” movement – The great, super great commands f, F, t, T and ; that let you move to specific characters within a line.

Basic Movement (Screencast 2)

See it straight from Vimeo at Basic Movement (Screencast 2).

What we’ll cover

Paging – Moving the page up and down by full pages with CTRL-f and CTRL-b and by half pages with CTRL-u and CTRL-d.

Cursor jumping to screen parts – Moving to the head, middle and last line of a screen with H, M and L respectively.

Top and Bottom of the buffer – Jumping to the top line of the entire buffer with gg and the bottom of the entire buffer with G.

Jumping to a particular line – Get to a specific line number with <number>G.

Easy regular expression searching – The famous ‘*‘ and ‘#‘ keys for jumping by bounded regular expression.

Manual regular expression searching – Using ‘/‘ and ‘?‘ to manually search.

Basic Movement (Screencast 3)

See it straight from Vimeo at Basic Movement (Screencast 3).

What we’ll cover

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