Transcripts
1. Introduction: When using a terminal
window in MacOS or Linux, VIM is probably the most
popular text editor you should know to use. And the name VM
actually comes from VI. This is because the
original Unix text editor was called VI, which stands for visual, but it was later
improved by VIM, which stands for VI improve. In this class, we learn
the basics of VIM, which covers opening files, navigating through
them, making changes, saving them, or creating completely new
files from scratch. If this is what you're
looking for, let's
2. Opening and closing Vim: So I already have a terminal
window open on my computer. This is a Linux terminal. If you don't know how
to open a terminal, simply go ahead and search on your system for a
program called terminal. Now the next thing is
to locate a TXT file. So if you don't already
have a TXT file, you can also go ahead and
use the following commands. You're going to use here
Fine. Forward slash. This means we're going to search for the entire file system. Going to provide
you a dash name. And we're going to see
here that we want to find all the files that end with TXT. And this will bring us here
a list of possible files, and just going to
select one of them. I'm going to copy this with Control C or Command
C, if you're on MacOS. I'm going to use
the copy command, CP to copy this in the
current directory, and just going to
use here the data as a reference to the
current directory. So this is an important data that you see here
right at the end. So the only thing that
we want you to do is to have this
particular file here. So I'm using the LS command to list all the files in
the current folder. I see here we have
starting that TXT. This is the file that we're
going to use initially. So how can we see
the contents of this file with VIM?
Well, that's super easy. All we have to do is
type in the command VIM, and then the name of
the file one open. So in this case, it's going to be starting that TXT and just going to type here SD
and then press tab, and this will autocomplete, make sure that doesn't
make any errors. And what do you see this file is actually the VIM
reference manual, so it explains things about VIM. I haven't planned this.
This is more by accident. Now, I have to tell you
that a lot of people have a horrible experience when they're using VIM
for the first time. And this is because it's
so easy to open a file, but I have no idea how to exit VIM once they've
opened the file. So I'm here to make sure that you have a much
better experience. Now, what people try is to
press Escape or Control C, then they start, I don't know, stuff happens and
they don't know, Oh, my God, what
has happened here? I don't know how to exit. I'm stuck. What should I do? Should I turn off my computer? Some people do that. Pun,
computer is out, rebooting. Okay. So this is something
that we want to avoid. So just in case you
already tried something, you're not sure
what has happened where you are,
simply press Escape. So that's the first
thing. You press Escape. Next thing that you want
to do is type in column, and this will show up here right at the bottom
of the screen. So this is the column character, and this allows us to type
in something inside here, and we're going to type in Q exclamation mark,
and then press Enter. And who managed to exit VIM. So let's go ahead and open it once again so that we
can take a look around. You can use your error keys to navigate around
so you can simply go down if you want to see what's the content or you
can simply go up. So these are at least
the basic things in terms of using VIM. Let's try again exiting again. I'm going to type in column, Q, exclamation mark, enter,
and we have exited.
3. Vim operating modes (insert mode, command mode): VIM operates in different modes, which is a key concept
to understand. So let's go over the modes that exist
so that you know what they are and you can understand which mode
you're currently into. So I'm going to
use the VM command to open up the same file. And what we're seeing
right now on the screen, this is the normal mode. This is the mode for
navigating around. So for example, we can use
the arrow keys and we can see what this file is all
about. And that's fine. We have this cursor
here that we can go to the specific point in the file and pretty much look around like we would
do with any text editor. So this is how
we're going up and down at the most basic way. But there's also
the insert mode, and this is the mode for
making changes to this file. So if you want to insert text, if you want to remove text. And the way we activate
the insert mode is by pressing the
Ikey on the keyboard. And what you will notice here at the end of the screen
is this insert. So when you see here insert
at the bottom of the screen, you know, Oh, I'm
in insert mode. If I type something that is going to be then
part of the file. So if you're like, Oh, no, no, I don't want to be
in insert mode, all you need to do
is press escape on your keyboard and you will see here at the bottom,
insert will disappear. And last but not least, there's also command line mode. So command line mode
is activated when we type in the column
character on the keyboard, so you're going to see
here we now have column. And again, we can
type in a command. So the command as we
currently know is simply Q and the
exclamation mark, which tells VIM to exit
without saving any changes.
4. Making changes to a file with Vim: Now, let's say we do want to make some
changes to this file. So all we need to do is open it with VIM just
as we did before, and we may want to navigate to a specific part where we
want to make that change. So, for example, let's
say, right here, we want to make a change. And then we're going to press
I to Enter Insert mode. And now, if we type something, for example, I'm
going to press Enter, I'm going to create a new line, and I can write something
like this is a new line. So this is the
change that we made. And now let's say we're
done with making changes, then I press escape, and now we have exited
the insert mode, but we are not done yet. We want to save these changes. So the way we are saving
the changes is by simply activating here
the command mode, so this is done by
typing in column, and we can simply put here W, which stands for right. So this is going to
save the changes. So we can type in here right. And then these changes that
we did have been saved. You're going to say here
right after button written. Now, quite often, we don't want to save the changes
and still be inside VIM. So we are usually trying to do two things
at the same time. We want to save and
we want to quit. So again, we're going to
activate here command line mode, go write here W for
writing the changes, but also Q for quitting
and press Enter. So the changes will be
safe and we will exit. But this is not what I usually
use to quickly exit VIM. Instead, what I'm doing
is I'm simply entering command line mode and
then I'm pressing here X. So X will quickly save if there's something
to change and will exit. For me, it's just
faster to just type in X, Enter and exit, then to press W and Q to pretty much have
the same outcome.
5. Creating new files with Vim: A next, let's go ahead and create a completely
new file with VIM. And we're going to do this
in a very simple way. We're going to type
in the command VIM. And let's say we want
to create a new file which is called blog dot TXT. And I'm going to go
ahead and press Enter so that we can enter VIM. What we're going to
see here is this is the name of the file
that says here U. You're going to see here,
there's nothing in this file. So what this tilde here represent is just content that doesn't exist
at this point. So if you want to start
writing something, all we have to do is enter
Insert mode by pressing I, and we can write a
new line of text like today I'm earning VIM. Let's exit Insert mode
by pressing Escape. And if you want to save the changes that we
made to this file, I'm going to enter
command mode with column, type in X, and then press Enter, and now our file has been saved. If you want to
check its contents, we can use, again, VIM and
the exact same file name. And we're going to see here
that what we have entered here has been indeed safe.
6. Conclusion: So in this class, we
have just learned the absolute basics in
terms of using VIM. So I hope that you are
now much more confident that you at least know how
to exit VIM if you need to. But ideally, you should know how to make
changes to a file, how you can navigate
around by going up and down by creating
a new file with VIM and the basic
commands for exiting without saving and
exiting with saving. Thank you so much for
taking this course and hope to see you
in another class.
Valentin Despa
