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Practical VIM

Drew Neil

311 pages

A masterclass in digital craftsmanship that transforms a daunting tool into an extension of your own mind.

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What it feels like

Reading this book feels less like studying a software manual and more like apprenticing under a master craftsman. The pace is steady and deliberate, designed to be absorbed tip by tip with your hands resting on the keyboard. It cultivates a mood of deep, focused productivity, replacing the initial frustration of a steep learning curve with the profound satisfaction of sudden, elegant efficiency. The prose is crisp, modular, and relentlessly practical, stripping away fluff to reveal the underlying logic of keyboard-driven editing. It is a deeply empowering experience for developers and power users who crave flow state, offering a journey from clumsy keystrokes to the sheer joy of watching text rearrange itself at the speed of thought.

Mood
  • focused
  • productive
  • analytical
  • empowering
Tone
  • instructive
  • pragmatic
  • encouraging
  • authoritative
Pace
steady
Themes
mastery of tools · efficiency and automation · technical craftsmanship · continuous improvement · the joy of optimization
The writing
Crisp, modular, and highly actionable, breaking complex technical concepts into digestible, practical tips.
The arc
Moves from the initial friction of a steep learning curve to the profound satisfaction of effortless, keyboard-driven mastery.
Who it's for
Developers, sysadmins, and power users who want to transcend basic text editing and achieve a seamless flow state.

About the book

Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It's available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you'll quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 8 and includes three brand-new tips and five fully revised tips.

A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins who want to raise their game. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and supports most coding and markup languages.

Learn how to edit text the "Vim way": complete a series of repetitive changes with The Dot Formula using one keystroke to strike the target, followed by one keystroke to execute the change. Automate complex tasks by recording your keystrokes as a macro. Discover the "very magic" switch that makes Vim's regular expression syntax more like Perl's. Build complex patterns by iterating on your search history. Search inside multiple files, then run Vim's substitute command on the result set for a project-wide search and replace. All without installing a single plugin! Three new tips explain how to run multiple ex commands as a batch, autocomplete sequences of words, and operate on a complete search match.

Description from Open Library.

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