The keyboard driven text editor

04-Mar-2021 (last update 16-feb-2024)

If we think for a moment about software we are going to realize that the core of every program is just plain text, literally, just words in a file that someone wrote, this webpage is just text interpreted by your web-browser, whose also just plain text.

The way we tell computers what to do is with text, so in order to write that text we need a set of basic tools, one of which is a text editor, and this is were Vim is known for.

Vim is just a console text editor, “console” because vim can only be executed from the commandline (altough you can find distributions like gvim, which has it’s own window), a benefit of this is that, it’s very lightweight in terms of system resources. The term Vim stands for Vi IMproved, Vim is a rewrite and improved version of Vi, a console text editor that dates from 1978, it’s very similar to vim but with less features.

If you installed Vim and you don’t know how to move around or insert text, I’m only going to tell two things, first, how to exit, press esc a couple of times and also Ctrl+C, just to make sure that you are on normal mode, then type `:wq!` and press enter. I’m also going to tell you how to run vim tutor, just execute `vimtutor` from the commandline. Vim tutor is a very good tutorial included with vim, it teaches you how to use vim in an interactive way.

Vim configuration

Vim is also highly configurable, you can do configure vim by editing the .vimrc text file, which should be in you home directory in Linux or BSD based OSs, if not, you can create a new blank one and start from zero.

You can search for vim settings or copy from other’s config files, you can also check out my vim config file and take out the parts that would fit your needs. The basic settings are almost present in every config file like:

set syntax=on
set encoding=utf-8
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set number
set mouse+=a

Vim plugins

By default Vim comes with a lot of features missing, for example, a key binding to comment a line, or auto close brackets, parenthesis, etc, this features can be enabled by installing plugins.

Vim plugins are like pieces of other’s config files that you can include in yours. The simpler way of managing plugins is with a plugin manager, I use vim-plug.

Installing a plugin

First install vim-plug or any other vim plugin manager, for vim-plug enter the link I left you above, and follow the instructions. For any other plugin manger I think it would be pretty similar. After you got a plugin manager installed simply call the plugins that you want from you .vimrc file, for example I’m using vim-plug and the section where I call the plugins in my .vimrc file looks like this:

Plug 'christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator'
Plug 'justinmk/vim-syntax-extra'
Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'jiangmiao/auto-pairs'
Plug 'preservim/nerdtree'
Plug 'morhetz/gruvbox'
Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag'
Plug 'hankchiutw/nerdtree-ranger.vim'

then, in the case of vim-plug, you need to run :PlugInstall to install all the new plugins added.