Vim Crash Course For Beginners

Key Takeaways

[Music] what is going on guys welcome back in today's video we're going to do a vim crash course for beginners so let's get right into it so for those of you who don't know vim is a command line based editor which means that it's not running in a graphical user interface like vs code it's not an ide like pycharm or intellij it's a command line based editor which is probably why so many people are intimidated when they use it because it's not intuitive at all when you get into them the first thing that you ask is how do i get out of them because it's not intuitive you cannot just go ahead i mean of course you can't close the terminal but that's not how you leave vim properly that's not how you write into files that's not how you override changes one of the questions when you ask when you get it first into vim is how do i actually enter some text because you start in normal mode and not in insert mode how do i get into insert mode what is insert mode how do i leave it how do i write into the file then and so on so um in this video what i want to do is i want to take away some of that intimidation and fear so that you get a little bit more familiar with vim and then past that point once we reach that point i also want to excite you a little bit about this editor because it has some very interesting features commands shortcuts and and things that you can do with this editor to massively speed up your coding speed and i personally nowadays i'm only coding in vim anymore because it's super fast in the beginning you're super slow because you don't know what you're doing at all and you need to practice but after a couple of weeks you get super fast at coding in bim and you can massively increase your developer speed however in this video i don't want to talk too much about why you should be using them i just want to show you some basics here so i'm going to make this video as short as possible and at the same time put in as much information as possible and the first thing we're going to talk about is how do you get into them how do you get them onto your system and if you're on linux or on mac you already have them in your terminal you just need to open up the terminal and then you can type vi and i'm going to talk about about windows in a second you just type vi and then you get into vim now chances are that you don't have them installed but you have vi installed because vim is vi improved so if you type vi make sure that you have vim installed if you don't have them installed you need to type sudo apt install vim vim on linux or i think brew install or however you install stuff on mac and then install vim and then you can either start it with vim or if it's bound or binded automatically you just say vi and it automatically opens vim so if that's the case uh you can start uh editing directly on windows you don't have them on your system you don't even have vi on your system it's not in cmd it's not in powershell and you can do two things to get them onto your system the first thing is you can download the linux subsystem for windows which is what i'm doing however this is a little bit more complex the intel installation is not as intuitive maybe if you're not too familiar with um with with computer science programming or linux at all it's a little bit intimidating um however if you're comfortable installing a linux subsystem on windows by using the app store and maybe maybe i'm going to make a video on that in the future but if you're comfortable doing that i highly recommend that because that's very awesome um and otherwise what you can do is you can get g vim which i think stands for graphical user interface vim i'm not sure but it's a uh an application that you can download on windows and you can code in vim directly on windows so that's how you can get uh vim onto your system all right so let's get started with the very basic stuff first we're going to create a new file by typing vi test.txt this is how we create a new file or if test.txt already exists we're going to open up the existing file in this case it's a new file as you can see down here on the left and let me give you the first tip here if you want to leave them right away you press colon q and you're out of them if you are in insert mode or in any other mode you press escape to leave that mode and you press wq to get out of them that's where most people get stuck when they use vim for the first time so uh you don't want to fall into that trap if you want to insert some text because by default you start into the so-called normal mode if you want to insert some text what you do is you press the i key to enter the insert mode as you can see down here on the left and then you can just write some text here hello world what's up this is vim and it is awesome whatever and with uh the escape key you get out of that insert mode so then if you want to write into the file if you want to save the changes you have to press w or actually colon w and then you wrote the text into the file and you can say wq to write and quit at the same time if you change something and you don't want to save it so let's say we insert some other stuff down here some other stuff and we don't want to save it but we also don't want to delete it manually what do we need to do is we need to say colon q and exclamation mark which means that we're just going to ignore all the changes we're not going to save them we're going to overwrite them and if we go back into the file the text is gone we didn't save it so that's the very basic stuff you can navigate using the arrow keys obviously or if you want to be a bit uh more vim like uh more professional you can use the h j k and l keys l goes right h goes left and j goes down k goes up this makes a lot of sense if you're using 10 fingers for typing because then you don't have to move to the arrow keys you're saving a lot of time there because you don't have to to move your right hand to the arrow keys so if you're a 10 finger typer a very skilled 10 finger typo you don't want to use the arrow keys i'm still practicing this is why i'm using the arrow keys it's a bit more intuitive but that's definitely something i need to change here but that's the basic navigation in vim now we can also enter the insert mode using some other keys we don't need to be limited to the i key because let's say i take this word awesome here and i want to enter some text at the point s if i press i what happens is that i enter some text before the s if i press a on the other hand and i think a stands for append we're still getting into insert mode but where if i press a now we go one to the right and insert there so we're entering uh we're inserting text after the letter that we selected this is very important and also we can use capital i and capital a to navigate to the beginning of the line or to the end of the line so if i press capital i and i enter some text here you can see it's going to the beginning of the line and it's entering some text there and if i press capital a you can see it's entering the text at the end of the line now then we also have the o o means open up a new line below so if i if i just press the o key it opens up a new line below and i can enter some text here and if i press uppercase oh it's opening or creating a line above the line that i'm currently at and then i can enter some text here so this is the basic navigation and inserting in bim all right so let's get to some stuff that's a bit more interesting instead of just using the arrow keys or hjkl we can also jump word by word so if we're in normal mode and i select this word here and then i press w it's jumping a whole word this is very very important because we're not just needing this for navigation we also need this for selection we're going to talk about that in a second but besides w we also have b which is going back and we also have uppercase w and uppercase b and i think this doesn't matter for this particular line here but let's say we have something like i don't know uh hello underscore world or i don't know what periods test one two three or something now if i press w it's jumping to the point whereas if i press uppercase w it's jumping the whole thing because this is one block of code we're not having any spaces in between and this is why it's treating it as whole um as a whole word if you're using the uppercase w and also if you're using the uppercase b b is just going backwards so that's something that you need to know even if you're not using it for navigation because you prefer using the arrow keys we're going to need it right now because we're going to next talk about replacing cutting uh pasting and copying or yanking as it's called in in bim so let's say you want to replace something here now first of all you can replace it by just pressing the r key if i want to replace this w here i just press r and i can press p as the next character and you can see it is now apesim uh so it changed the w to a p and i can change it back r w and now we have awesome again if i want to replace a whole word uh letter by letter i just have to press uppercase r and you can see down here on the left i'm now in replacing mode and i can just write some word space test and so on so it's overriding the letters from this particular point but we also can just replace the whole word and it doesn't have to have the same length so let's say i want to replace this end here with another word what i can do to do this is i can press the c key but c alone doesn't do a lot because c is just the replacing key but then again i need to say okay how much do i want to replace because maybe i want to replace the whole line maybe i want to replace just uh two words maybe i want to replace one word so what do i actually want to replace and in order to specify this i have to follow up with another command so i need to say c and then what i need to say cw in in order to change the whole word so uh here i'm just going to say hello whatever now so so this basically means if i want to change hello world here i can say cw and the word is gone or the world is gone um i can also start doing this in the middle of the word but then it's not going to replace the whole word it's just going to replace from here to the end of the word so cw and the w0 is still here but the rld is gone this is because you need to always ask what happens if i'm here and i press w it's navigating to the end of of the line or to the end of the word so if i have something here and if i'm in the middle of the word and i say w it's going to the next word which means that if i say cw it's replacing that okay so don't make it too complicated we can also and this is where the magic of them comes into play we can also combine this with numbers so i can go ahead and say okay i don't want to jump one word or two words i want to jump x amount of words so i can just type seven w and it's jumping seven words now we don't have seven words here so let's do it with three i can say three w and it's jumping three words and guess what we can also combine this with the replacement so i can say c three w and it's replacing three words with whatever i write here now this is very powerful and this is where the magic of them actually comes from because you can you can almost program while you're typing you can say okay the next five words i want to replace them with this and i want to do this or i want to navigate as many line down so for example another thing you can do is you can just say four and press the down key and you go four lines down instead of pressing down four times and of course if you have a lot of more lines let's say we have some lines here whatever and i want to navigate 15 lines up i say 15 up and i jump 15 lines up instead of pressing the up key or the down key 15 times so this is very beneficial here speeds up the development now let's talk about some more stuff we can also use uppercase c what uppercase c does is it just uh replaces the rest of the line so if i'm targeting this h here and i press uppercase c it's just replacing everything that comes after it including the h itself or the selected character itself and i can just write some stuff here notice it's always entering insert mode if i just want to delete it without entering insert mode afterwards so because if i say c uppercase c it's going into insert mode if i just want to delete without going into insert mode i have to press d so uppercase d to delete uh the rest of the line or i can say dw to uh to delete the word so here them for example dw deleting the word without entering the insert mode or d2w for deleting two words and so on so this is this is kind of useful and then we can also combine or not not necessarily combine them but we can also use those two commands so c and d we can use them to delete or to replace whole lines so if i go into this line here even though i'm not selecting the beginning of the line i'm somewhere in the middle of the line i can press cc to replace the whole line or i can place dd to delete the whole line and i can do this all the time and guess what again magic of them i can also go ahead and say 4 dd to delete four lines or i can go ahead and and just i don't know 7dd or 7cc to enter the inter insert mode and you can see that when you're editing your code this can be very useful for example i don't know let's say you have some kind of for loop here you say 4 and i equals 0 i less than i less than 100 i plus plus and then you have some stupid loop codes down here that's always being executed i don't know what you want to delete all that and of course you can just go into insert mode and you can do this or you can uh go ahead and and select this with the mouse in an ordinary editor but in vim you can just navigate to the beginning of this uh for loop here and you can just say okay how many lines are those here there are 15 lines so i can say 15 dd and maybe 16 because we need to do one more because this is the zeroth line so 16 dd and everything is gone and this is very very uh practical you can also go inside of that and you can say okay uh 14 dd and you can have the loop empty right now so this is a very very interesting thing that you can do with them every command every key that you learn you can combine it with numbers and with other commands and so on and this is where the magic comes from if you're coding in vim for multiple weeks or months you're getting used to that and when you see something you want to change you can just press five keys combined with some numbers and you can do what what you would uh have to do manually in other editors and it would take more time in other editors but you can do it in vim with a bunch of key presses now in vim we can also of course undo stuff so let's say we have some texture and i change this word here i do something then i insert a few lines then i delete this line again and then i do something again and now i want to undo some stuff i can just press the u key and it's undoing the last operation and i can press uh ctrl r to redo all all of this stuff and of course this can be combined again with numbers so i can say okay undo the last three operations or redo the last four operations um and and undo i don't know undo 80 operations and so on because sometimes you write some code and you notice okay this is not good code i wasted my time for the last 20 minutes and now i want to undo all this instead of spamming the u key or spamming the redo key you can just say okay roughly 40 undos and then a bit more or 50 undues and then a bit more and so on so this is a very useful feature instead of clicking or or pressing the u button all the time or ctrl r for redo and so on it's quite a useful feature and then i also want to talk a little bit more about some advanced editing because let's say we have we already saw how we can change words let's say we have something like uh neural nine video tutorials and so on and i want to change the tutorials word but i don't want to navigate to the beginning of the word because if i want to change the word i have to navigate to the beginning and say cw for change word but maybe i'm currently here and i want to change the whole word but if i say cw here i can just change the rest of the word so if i want to change this first of all of course i can navigate to the beginning by pressing b and then cw but you can also if you're inside of a word say change the inner word replace the inner word which means that we're selecting this word as a whole and replacing it so i can say c i w and it's replacing the full word so this is c i w here like that this is replacing the inner word and i can of course do this with delete as well d i w is deleting the inner word and this does not only work with words this also works with brackets so if i say something like 4 and i equals 0 i is less than 100 i plus plus and then i have some code here blah blah blah some nonsense and now i want to change everything in between those parentheses here what i have to do is i have to go somewhere inside of those parentheses doesn't matter where and then i say c i and a bracket and i replaced the whole content of this and of course this also works with those uh curly brackets here i think it should work across multiple lines so change inner curly brackets and i change the whole content here yeah as you can see now we can also jump between the opening and closing brackets so if i'm here at the opening bracket i can type percent to jump to the closing bracket i can do the same thing with the curly brackets here like that just percentage and of course this can again be used for selection so i can say okay change percent to change everything from this bracket to the closing bracket this is something that i can do here as well um then what do we have here we also have some navigational tools so instead of just going up and down and word by word i can also go to the beginning of a file let's just write a little bit more here to see what this does i can go to the beginning of a file if i'm somewhere in the file by pressing gg like good game and i go to the beginning of a file and if i press capital g i go to the end of a file and if i press a line number for example i don't know if i'm down here somewhere and i press seven and capital g it jumps to line seven but we can also do this with a colon so if i'm somewhere in the code and i have like multiple lines of code and there's somewhere up there and i want to jump to line 15 i just have to say colon 15 and there you go we're jumping to line 15. so this is one thing that we can do we can also navigate to the end of a line using a dollar sign or beginning of a line using a zero um that way we can jump without entering the insert mode by the way because then we can just use capital a and capital i if you want to insert but if you just want to jump there if you just want to say okay i want to delete until the end of the line so d and dollar deleting the end of the line until the end of the line um this is something those are the things that we can use so um then we can also talk about some pasting and copying if you want to copy something we need to first select it and for this we need to enter the visual mode we enter the visual mode using uh the v button so just v and then we can select stuff we can select stuff and once we select this stuff we can then press uh whatever action want to do so d would be deleting and if we select something and we press c this is replacing and what we can also do is we can just copy and we need to enter the visual mode we select something and then we press the y key which stands for yanking or yank and if i do this we yank this as you can see six lines yanked and then i can press p in some point here at some point in the in the text file and it's going to enter to paste all this here now if i if i select this line here and i press paste it's going to enter uh right in inside of this line here if i press uppercase p it's going to enter it above this uh we can also yank whole lines if i just say yy uh we're going to yank the whole line and then i can say p to paste some stuff here so i can also say of course five yy to yank the next five lines and then i can paste all of them of course they're paste as blocks so i can say paste and navigate some like here paste and so on so this is something we can do um and we can of course also yank some words so you can say okay i have some words here and i can just say okay yank two words and then i can paste and i can also say of course paste multiple times i can say 7p and then i'm pasting have some have some have some and so on so this is one thing that we can also do and of course we can do all the things that we already know we can have some brackets with some text here and i want to copy everything inside of those brackets so what i do is i say y i w or actually this was word y i bracket and then i have everything in those brackets copied and i can paste it five times like that so this is also something that we can do here uh this is how you copy and paste remember you have uh and i think you can also use um i'm not sure about that though i think you can use uppercase y to yank the rest of the line um but i think it's just copying the whole line yeah i think if you if you just use uppercase why it's copying the whole line yeah seems seems to be the case so now let's also talk about some more visual modes we don't have the ordinary visual mode only we also have visual lines visual lines means uh we're selecting multiple lines at once or we're selecting whole lines instead of just regions so we can start this by pressing shift and v or uppercase v and then we can select some lines once we have them we can say y for yanking them and we can say p for pasting what we've yanked or we can just select some lines to delete them with d or we can go into visual line mode say 50 down and then say d to the delete 50 lines or we can do it again 50 down d and so on and we also have something called the visual block mode the visual block mode is a column wise selection so let's say we have hey what is up what is going on what is happening or something like that and i would want to do is we want to change or we want to delete some words here so let's go into visual block mode we do this by pressing ctrl and v and then we can just select column wise like that and i can select those words here and i can press d to just remove them in visual block mode so this is just one thing i want to show you here um and of course we can also in visual mode in ordinary visual mode we can use also all the navigational tools like w to select the individual words and so on now then we also can do something like let's say we change word to low here so c w hello i can repeat the same operation here by just pressing the dot key so like that we're changing if i'm at neural nine here and i press dot it's going to change null line to hello because that's the last operation that i did then we also have uh stuff like zz for centering this is very useful sometimes you know you're writing code and vim you're writing some stuff in them and then you're here at the bottom and even if you're if you're just creating new lines you're always at the bottom and sometimes you don't like to be at the bottom so what you can do is you can just press z z to center the screen to center your selection to have your selection in the center of the screen uh this is a very useful thing that i like to do and then we also have some stuff like indentation and shifting so if i have for example let's say we have a for loop again and i equals 0 i less than 100 i plus plus and then we have some stuff in here and then i don't have the code indented here now what i can do here is i can go into visual line mode and i can just use the shift key which is uh the angle brackets key that goes to that side to the right side and i can just press it and shift it i can also press it twice in the line to shift the individual line and i can also do the opposite direction by just pressing the angle bracket that's opening it up so the the opening angle bracket um and also if i have auto indent uh or actually auto indent it's not what i'm looking for but i can also press the equals key to automatically indent now of course this is language specific this is a text file so i'm not sure if it's going to do it if it's doing it right here but you're just selecting a region and then you press the equal sign to auto-indent that region now in this case it's doing something here but in python or in c at least it should be indenting in a right way and of course what you can do if you want to indent the whole file is you can just say gg to go to the beginning of the file then you press equals and then you press uppercase g to go to the end of the file then it's indenting indenting the whole uh the whole file and of course you can do this also with deletion so you can say gg d uppercase g and it's deleting the whole thing this is also something you can do so last but not least let's talk about some commands those are things that we're not going to just press but they're going to show down here with a colon or with a slash so let's say we have a text hello world i love this world did i already say the word world so that we have this world or this word occurring multiple times and what we can do now is we can type slash and then we can just say world and then we're going to find the occurrences we can press the n key lowercase n to navigate to the next occurrence or we can press uppercase n to go to the previous occurrence and if we're selecting a word we can also do this with a hashtag sign uh it goes to the to the last occurrence or with the plus sign that goes to the next occurrence even if we don't search for word um manually so this is the searching and we can also use this to replace stuff so let's say we're in normal mode and i can say colon and then i can say percent for the whole file percent s slash and then we can say world is going to be replaced with i don't know neural nine and then we're going to say g for globally and then every world is replaced with neural nine if i want to do this in one line only so let's say down here i also have neural nine as a word and i want to replace neural nine in this line what i do is i say uh colon s slash neural nine replace with best youtube channel g it's going to replace it in that line but it's not going to replace it down here so this is how you do a basic substitution basic search and replace in vim and now we can also look at some settings so let's say we want to have some some custom settings here first of all what i have on the left here is the numbers you can set number to have line numbers um but i have a special thing as well activated so if you just say set number you're going to get one two three and so on but i have also activated relative numbers so you say set relative number and if you do set relative number you're going to see the numbers relative to your current position so add the number right now you're going to see the line number and then you're going to see okay this is in fact line number six i think it's 876 yes um but it's showing me that it's three above the current line and this is useful because sometimes i'm going to have a selection and i want to know okay what is this line at because i don't want to count and i'm just going to say okay seven so seven up and i'm going to select this delete this and so on this is very useful then you can also uh choose a color scheme and just say colon color scheme and then you can choose some color schemes here some some basic stuff like i don't know let's go for let's go for dark blue or was it dark blue like that or color scheme blue like that it's not the most beautiful color scheme but you can play around with those actually it's hurting my eyes so let's go back to slate that's the one i used i think um and yeah so this is also something you can do you can also set the tab stop set tab stop equals four or eight whatever you use as a tab size uh you can also do auto indent if you want your code to be auto indented so auto indent and you can also activate the mouse in fact so if you want to scroll with the mouse if you if you have some some code here and you want to be able to scroll with the mouse which is not enabled by default right now i'm scrolling nothing is happening and i can also not really select anything i'm i can select a terminal but it's not selected in bim if i want to activate this i can say set mouse equals a and then i can scroll here with the mouse and i can also select select here you can see i'm entering visual mode and so on so this is also quite useful for those of you who don't want to quit using the mouse just because you use them now last but not least i want to mention that some people are going to be intimidated because vim looks so boring you just have this black screen or maybe blue or white depending on the color scheme but you just have the screen and some code it's very boring maybe you don't want to code in it i just want to show you here how vim could look like if you take the time to customize it to install some plugins and you still have all the benefits that i showed you in this video all those commands um but for example we can look at my neo vim setup here by just saying nvm dot to open the current directory so first of all i have a file tree here second of all i can just open up code you can see it's syntax highlighted i have a an airline down here you can see uh what do we have here do not show again just cancel this uh you can see i'm in normal mode i'm in insert mode i'm in visual mode you can see it has some nice colors it shows me okay you're in python it shows me the encoding i can open up some file tree here i can open up with f8 a custom plugin that i have i can open up some stuff on the side here i can open up a terminal in split mode here so i can do a lot of things here and it's not that boring if you configure it right but that takes time i'm going to make a video on my config as well uh with neovim here but i think this is kind of motivating to see that you can actually code in a very efficient way you can edit code in a very efficient way and it doesn't have to look boring you can actually configure vim to look like vs code and then it's in my opinion the better editor so that's it for this video hope you enjoyed i hope you learned something if so let me know by hitting the like button and leaving a comment in the comment section down below and let me know if you want to see more vim content if you want to see my config if you want to see some uh plugging rankings some plug-in recommendation if you want to see some more vim content in general uh let me know in the comment section hit the like button and of course don't forget to subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell to not miss a single future video for free other than that thank you very much for watching see you next video and bye [Music] you