Re: A very naive question: any doc (book, web page, ...) to learn step by step how to custom configure vim?

On 08/11/2017 09:53 AM, John Passaro wrote:
> To my mind, the short answer is learn regular, unconfigured vim first.

I'd suggest not modifying how Vim behaves / does thing while getting started with Vim.

However that does not extend to unconfigured Vim. I say this because things like line numbers (:set number), search highlighting (:set hlsearch), and (syntax highlighting (:syntax on) do not modify Vim's behavior, but (I think) they do make Vim a bit more friendly.

IMHO there's a subtle but distinct difference.

> To go deeper and really set yourself up for powerful configuration, it
> helps to go a little deeper than vimtutor. I learned a lot by reading
> Practical Vim (by Drew Neil of vimcasts.org <http://vimcasts.org>)

I also strongly recommend Practical Vim & Vimcasts.

> Before that, I was more or less just copying stuff without
> really understanding what it did. The book was an amazing combination of
> depth and accessibility; I gained a huge amount of knowledge without
> having to work all that hard. (The real understanding comes in the
> practice of course, but the book does a lot to set you up for that.)

I have also found some people on Twitter that seem to have some impressive VimFu. Here are some people I recommend, in alphabetical order:

@ed1conf - Vim can do much of what ed does, and ex mode is quite similar.
@gumnos - WONDERFUL resource. Tim is happy to explain the odd things that he does in Vim.
@MasteringVim - Lots of good information and is working on a book.
@nixcraft - LOTS of good unix things, including Vim info.
@VimLinks - Frequently has interesting Vim specific things.

I also frequently tweet, as @DrScriptt, things about Vim, or comment on other peoples tweets, frequently asking questions. @gumnos tends to have wonderful answers to explain things.

I played, enjoyed, and learned from VIM Adventures (https://vim-adventures.com/). (I never beat the boss at the end.) - I'm tempted to re-up my subscription and play again. - There are some free levels.

I would also recommend that you learn some about regular expressions. - Vim is a little bit different than other RE engines, mainly in escaping some special control characters. - I find that RE's are EXTREMELY powerful and probably what brought me into Vim.

Sorry for devolving from Vim customization into general Vim. - But then again, you need to learn enough base Vim to decide what you want to customize.

Finally, strive to understand what things do, and how they do it.

@gumnos and I had a discussion about the following yesterday:

:let a=''|g/pattern/y A

See https://twitter.com/gumnos/status/846310953494986752 for more details.

> A quick perusal of Mr. Neil's site yields at least one essay about the
> pros and cons of customizing. Cutting to the end you'll find Mr. Neil
> seems to agree you should learn vim itself:

Agreed. Learn the basics of Vim, get annoyed by it, find a way to change what annoys you, put those changes in your .vimrc as you grow and learn more Vim.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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