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I have finished my first read through of Practical Vim by Drew Neil and my first impression is WOW! I didn’t realize what a Vim beginner I was until I read this book. The book is organized into 121 tips, grouped by category. The book presumes knowledge of Vim’s basic commands, but nothing more. It starts you on your Vim adventure by “Introducing” the dot (redo) command. He doesn’t just show that it repeats the last change, he show how to edit your document to maximize the use of the dot command to automate repetitive tasks.

Part 1 goes though all of the Vim modes. For anyone more familiar with a WYSIWYG editor like Microsoft Word or Open Office, the idea of modes can be confusing. Drew makes a great analogy to a painter painting a picture. A painter does not rest with his brush on the canvas, he only touches the canvas when he wants to make a change. This is like Vim’s normal and insert mode. Normal mode is used for resting, and moving around the document, Insert mode is for making changes. He continues on to cover the normal, insert, visual, and command-line modes in detail, giving great tips to squeeze every bit of power out of them.

Part 2 goes through managing files and buffers. Vim does not allow direct edits to a file, it first loads the file data into a buffer and you modify the buffer. Then if you are happy with the results you can write the buffer out to the file. Drew provides tips for managing multiple files and buffers, splitting the workspace into multiple windows, and saving files as the super user.

Part 3 covers advanced methods of moving around within the document. Tip number 51 was especially useful for me since most of my text editing tasks are done in various source code. Tip 51 shows how to quickly select text between different kinds of brackets. This section continues to show the best ways to move between files with jumps. This is a very common task when programming. Especially if you are trying to jump from some code that is using a function to where a function is defined. Drew shows how to use global markers to allow easy jumping.

Part 4 bring us into registers in Vim. Registers are used for a verity of tasks. They can hold text, or store macros. Drew shows us how to make the most of registers. Macros are especially useful for automating repetitive multi-keystroke tasks that would other wise be very time consuming.

Part 5 is a huge section that covers all of the searching, sorting, and substitution commands that Vim has to offer. Drew talks about the difference between how Vim handles regular expressions, and what users might be used to with other tools. He also shows the power of the “very magic” flag (I love that name). This section is one that I will be reading again and again for the foreseeable future.

Drew wraps up the book with Part 6. Part 6 covers the extra tools and goodies that take Vim from a great editor, to an amazing editor. For programming, ctags is an indispensable tool! Drew shows how to set up ctags to work with Vim. He also dives into using auto completion, which can be used for programming as well as writing documents where you may have a word that you have used previously but might not recall the spelling later in the document. Drew finishes this section by going through the Vim spell checker. Those who know me personally know that I can’t spell to save my life! The Vim spell check is very powerful and can decipher my most egregious spelling mistakes. It usually can guess my intention in the first 3 choices.

This book was a fantastic eye opener! I highly recommend reading it if like me you have chosen to make Vim your one and only editor. You will most likely have to read it through a few times and execute the commands to commit them to memory. I have already found myself in the situation where I remember there was a tip for my exact problem, but I can’t remember the steps and needed to look it up. Thats okay though since this book does make for an excellent desk reference because of it’s “tip” based organization. Check out this book at the Pragmatic Programmer website, and check out Vimcasts where dozens of excellent videos and tutorials for Vim are posted for free!