Vim: The best text Editor for editing your files everywhere

June 9, 2016 · 7 mins read
Categories: Six weeks training   | vim   | text-editor   | programming |

I was introduced to vim by one of the senior during my college. As soon as I found about it, I fell in love with it.

I liked the thinking of not moving your hand off the keyboard so I explored more about this. I used one of the great website of tech world called linux.com for the reference purpose.

Install vim on your machine

1. Install vim on your machine
2. Different Modes available in Vim
3. Moving around through the text in vim
4. Undoing and Redoing changes in vim
5. vim is slow while opening large files
6. How to check the time taken by plugins to while opening vim?
I installed this on my system by using the command.

sudo apt-get install vim
On most of the systems you can find vim already installed on the machines.

You can use the following command to install vim on MAC.

brew install vim
So let’s start with the things that I have learned about Vim.

Why would you even try to waste your time toward learning a full flagged text-editor. Vim is world’s best text editor for a reason whenever you work with Vim you never have to move your hand off the keyboard.

You don’t need to go to mouse again and again and waste your time during the purpose.

Your total typing speed will increase in the long run. Although their may be dip in the speed when you are trying it for the learning purpose but if you choose to start then this will the best decision that you might have made in a long time.

Different Modes available in Vim

The first and foremost thing that one should read about is various modes present in vim.

The major 4 modes present in vim are:

  • Command Mode

  • Insert Mode

  • Last-Line Mode

  • Visual Mode

We can check for the version of Vim by launching the command

vim -v
Press :q to quit this mode.

Whenever we open a file by placing a command

vim filename
where filename is the preffered name of your file, this command first checks for the  existence of the file. If the file exist then it opens it and if their is no file by this name then it create it and opens a blank file for us with ~ sign on the beginning of each line.

This sign represents the empty line in the document. Now while using this command the editor opens in the terminal only. The first mode in which the file opens is the command mode this mode is used is used move in the document i.e. you can press j to move the cursor one line down.( we will discuss more about the commands later.)

We can switch to the to insert mode by using i key. Press i key to open this mode. You can change anything in the document when you are in this mode.

The other mode is Last-Line mode which used for other purposes like saving the file.

You can simply use the visual mode by simply using v while in the command mode.

Visual Mode can help you with copy-pasting the parts of the text.

Moving around through the text in vim

Most of the commands are used in command mode unless specified otherwise.

Moving around the file is one of the main reason why would someone need to touch the touchpad or mouse.

Vim tries to make it fairly easy for you to move around in the long and big files.

Jumping to a specific line number

:<line_number>
Example

:500

Finding something specific in the file

/search_term
Once you get to one of the instance, keep typing n to find more instances of the same text.

Moving around

  • j is for going down.
  • k is for going up.
  • l is for going right by one character.
  • h is for going left by one character.
  • shift + g is for going all the way to the last line of the file.
  • $ is for going to the last character of the line.
  • 0 is for going to the first character of the line.
  • w is for jumping over the words.
  • b is for jumping over the words in opposite direction.

Undoing and Redoing changes in vim

You can simply use u for undoing the changes and ctrl + r to make redo the changes done.

vim is slow while opening large files

Vim is a good option to edit files of any size but as the size of the file increases, it becomes really slow to load the first screen of the vim.

So, if you only want to read the file and don’t really want to make any changes, you can switch to some other alternatives which doesn’t load the full file in the memory and only loads the parts that are visible. ( less is one good alternative).

I tried to open one of the log file, with more than 20000 k lines using vim and less commands to compare the time taken. It includes the time taken to open and close the files.

I used the time shell command to compare these time differences.

Time output while opening the file using vim

vim app.log  7.51s user 0.82s system 90% cpu 9.203 total

Time output while opening the file using less

less app.log  0.03s user 0.01s system 5% cpu 0.579 total
Clearly the differences are huge and it is also because of the numerous plugins that I am using to power vim installation in my local system.

How to check the time taken by plugins to while opening vim?

As I have already shared that I have a lot of plugins installed for the local setup of vim which include things autocomplete and other features as well.

I wanted to check how these plugins are performing while opening the files in vim.

Here is the command which can be used for the purpose.

vim --startuptime /dev/stdout +qall
This will print the output to the console.

I could see a output something similar to,

times in msec
 clock   self+sourced   self:  sourced script
 clock   elapsed:              other lines

1226.324  000.467  000.467: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/quickfix.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                                               1227.984  001.364  001.364: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline.vim
                                               1229.092  000.466  000.466: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/netrw.vim
                                                                                                                                                                1230.380  000.636  000.636: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/term.vim
1231.202  000.555  000.555: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/hunks.vim
                                                                                                                 1232.213  000.679  000.679: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/branch.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   1232.806  000.340  000.340: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/fugitiveline.vim
                                                                           1233.603  000.519  000.519: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/whitespace.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                 1234.388  000.296  000.296: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/wordcount.vim
                                      1235.492  000.881  000.881: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/tabline.vim
                                                                                                                                                         1235.966  000.261  000.261: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/tabline/autoshow.vim
     1236.818  000.483  000.483: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/tabline/tabs.vim
                                                                                                                             1237.671  000.537  000.537: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/tabline/buffers.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        1238.316  000.216  000.216: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/keymap.vim
                                                                                          1241.821  000.360  000.360: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/section.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                  1243.114  000.980  000.980: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/highlighter.vim
                              1247.465  000.286  000.286: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/themes.vim
                                                                                                                                     1247.925  001.253  000.967: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/themes/dark.vim
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 1280.470  001.053  001.053: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/builder.vim
                                                                         1281.347  000.326  000.326: sourcing /Users/ranvir/.vim/plugged/vim-airline/autoload/airline/extensions/default.vim
For more information check this stackoverflow answer

I hope you liked this post. Do share your experiences with vim and share your favourite tricks as well.


This is the basic overview of Vim. Please refer to other posts in the category.

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