Vim Reference Guide is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. It has more in common with cheatsheets than a typical text book. Topics like Regular Expressions and Macros have more detailed explanations and examples due to their complexity. Visit https://youtu.be/SyQe6zzOGZ0 for a short video about the book.
See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.
📹 I'm currently creating short 1-10 minute videos highlighting handy Vim features.
See also my curated list on Vim for beginner to advanced level learning resources.
- You can purchase the book using these links:
- You can also get the book as part of these bundles:
- Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex
- All books bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
- Includes all my programming books
- See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for list of other books
For a preview of the book, see sample chapters
The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdf/epub from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.
For web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/vim_reference/
Got several suggestions and feedback when my submission about this book reached the front page of Hacker News.
Great job on this! — rendall
Hi, great work releasing this! Trying to explain vim concisely is always an interesting challenge and I had a great time reading your attempt in this book. I always find it really interesting on how people try to group certain vim functions in a way that makes sense to people that don't use vim. I think you cover that idea pretty well in your 'Vim philosophy and features' section whilst not making it overly abstract and keeping it relatable. — doix
Neat stuff! One piece of feedback is that I would include "+p and "+yy in the copy and paste section. — mrpotato
I learnt regular expression by reading your books, thank you for the great work. — LamJH
A comment from another Hacker News thread:
I stumbled upon your vi post a few days ago, really like the style. Keep it up!
Open an issue if you spot any typo/errors.
I'd also highly appreciate your feedback about the book.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample
- Preface
- Introduction
- Insert mode
- Normal mode
- Command-line mode
- Visual mode
- Regular Expressions
- Macro
- Customizing Vim
- CLI options
- Vim help files — user and reference manuals
- /r/vim/ and vi.stackexchange — helpful forums
- canva — cover image
- Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
- oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner for optimizing images
- Rodrigo Girão Serrão for feedback and suggestions
- Andy for cover image suggestions
- Inkscape for favicon
- mdBook — for web version of the book
- mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each page
- minify-html — for minifying html files
- MDN: kbd — CSS for
<kbd>tag
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file