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Interactive Vim Tutorial (openvim.com)
102 points by of on Feb 17, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments


This thing is just as useless now as it was when it launched and was first featured here, one year ago (1). If you want to learn Vim's basics, just run the following command in your terminal as many times as needed to feel comfortable and force yourself to use Vim for gradually more complex and critical tasks:

    $ vimtutor
(1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3043866


Does that work on Windows? (honest question, cannot try since I don't have any Windows machine handy).

If not, then it's not useless.


Yes, it does (except you have to look for it in %programfiles(x86)%, and then it opens in a graphical window that doesn't take your .vimrc/.gvimrc into account)


(It seems that vimtutor on Linux also doesn't take your .vimrc into account; I think that's by design?)


I can't speak for its author(s) but the point of vimtutor is to help you learn Vim's basics in order to be up and running as quickly as possible. From that point of view, it's quite normal to go without special settings and plugins as that would taint the whole experience and learning. Vimtutor is a standardized tool and it would probably loose a lot if it was different for everybody.

By the way, going config-less for two or three days can be an eye opening adventure if you are too infatuated with your config.

Also, what would be the point of running vimtutor if you already have a ~/.vimrc? You probably already know everything it has to offer.


Yes, that's what I was thinking exactly. And a good idea re: trying to work for a bit without a .vimrc (or maybe re-adding basic shortcuts later on and ending up with a very minimalist vimrc).


I have a 15 or so lines long .vimrc that I put on all the VPSes I work on without any plugin. It's great for keeping myself sharp.


Open a terminal and type "vimtutor". It's pretty much the best way to learn Vim.


If you really want to learn VIM check out vim-adventures.com a truly interactive vim tutorial.


This is so neat. I'm completely new to vim, so it's doing a good job of forcing me to grind on the basics, and making that experience much more entertaining than a REPL. Better, I imagine that if you were somewhat experienced, you could just blast through this and get to the harder stuff.


Is your nickname a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross?


coffee is for coders.


F#, that's my name!


This was a nice intro to vim, showing the concepts fast. I was just wondering about the match braces commands. I propose that you show off the yank registers, and the @ macro function as well, along with the marks. Another great command is q: and q/. Another area is movement with marks, and filtering, maybe filtering isn't that easy to implement in your tutorial.


It was fun to make, and I'm happy if anyone finds it useful.


Nice, very nice ... Once you get used to it, this ancient 30 years old text editor is simply the best.


Poor rating in WOT, anybody know what's up? http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/openvim.com?utm_source=add...


It says it's listed on a blacklist of domains involved in spam. But it's not clear if all the folks pointing at the one blacklist are examples of it being relisted multiple times or just people rereporting that it's on that list. It's not listed in the last 30 days of additions at http://www.joewein.net/bl-log/bl-log.htm so I'd suspect that 2013-02-07 'event' listed on WOT is meaningless.

Considering the time of its first listing was right around the time of the domain's registration, and that the blacklist is apparently a list of domains /mentioned/ in spam, I wouldn't be too sure it's not just a case of some spammer copy/pasting a list of 'recently expired / created domain names' in a pitch for domain registration or something like that. Seeing as it's just the one blacklist, the current owner might be completely unaware of it.

Hard to guess, though. His MXs aren't listed on any of the usual blacklists, though that's not necessarily where spam would be coming from. On the other hand, spammers don't usually list their name and employer on the front page of their site.


Author here. I was informed some time ago that I was listed on a spam listing.

I informed this to the service provider, and got a fresh password. I'm using the service in a limited way (not access to virtual machine afaik); I don't even know how to detect if someone has setup'd a spam bot there.

If someone has information that there is still on-going spamming, I would be grateful if I would be informed of how I could get rid of it.

It disturbs me that someone had targeted my site for immoral activities.


Reminded me of this http://vim-adventures.com/; Prefer OP version since it gets you used to the way VIM works.


tutorials should teach to use ctrl+[ instead of ESC. it makes a big difference.


Or you could remap your capslock to ESC. It is possible in Windows, OS X & Linux and really makes a big difference. ESC is really usefull when it is in reach, even in windows.


Should teach both some keyboards layouts are awkward when it comes to the [ key.


ctrl+c is even better (in my opinion). In theory it doesn't work in every place ESC works, but I haven't noticed such places. Also ctrl+j works as ENTER. It does make a big difference to me.


You can also just map <c-c> <esc> and not have to ever worry about the edge cases.


ctrl+c is NOT the same thing. There are some very important operations that do not occur.


Learned a few new commands from this, thank you!


Anyone has something like for EMACS? I've been through the tutorial already but I'm looking for new ways to learn it.


Some way to remap keys would be awesome for us Dvorak users.


Nice! I enjoyed this... Thanks!


It's not very realistic, it's way too easy to close it!


Nicely done!


+1 Neat




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