
This lets you peruse the extensive built-in help, which has been more helpful than any other editor’s help. Of course the most important and useful command of them all is :help. Having more than one clipboard, and split windows, are pretty powerful features, and ones I found lacking in textmate. These features really exposed the power vim has, and got me hooked on using vim.
#Youtube macvim guide windows
The next topic, I spent time learning was buffers, windows and registers. Knowing the movement commands, also plays nicely with most other commands, making them more powerful as well. Learning the various movement commands, helps you more efficiently get around in your files, and is a big part of vim’s power. Getting into and out of the various modes is critical to getting work done. The most helpful things I found to try and master at the beginning were modes, and movement.
#Youtube macvim guide how to
It covers most of the essentials, such as vim’s modes, movement commands and how to make changes to text. I started off learning vim using vimtutor. I’ve added a few more python and PHP specific plugins, as that is what I spend most of my time working with. I’ve since forked Janus into my github account, which I use to keep my vim config in sync across my various computers. While Janus is a bit ruby focused, it comes with a number of great plugins all bundled together, so Vim noobs like me can figure things out. So after installing MacVim, I installed Janus. I heard one of the keys to using vim is to get a good. MacVim also supports more colours than terminal vim which is nice. While vim is already installed in most non-windows computers, I also installed MacVim mostly so I could get some normal OSX bindings, and ease myself into vim. Being able to get faster at something I do all day grabbed my interest as well. I’ve also seen people work pretty damn fast in vim if they knew what they were doing. Having to remember two sets of keyboard commands to do the same thing started to bug me. There is no Textmate in a terminal, so I used vim.

Due to working with many headless virtual machines and computers in far-away lands, I’m in a terminal quite often. So why bother switching? My first reason is I spend a ton of time in SSH + terminals. I’ve been a pretty hard core Textmate for about 5 years now, and haven’t really had any issues. About a month ago, I decided that I would try and switch to Vim as my only editor.
