Preface

This tutorial is a guide to master Vim skills. The column will contain a series of posts which can be either difficult or easy. Therefore, no matter whether you are a beginner or a professional, you can learn something from the posts for sure.

VIM's History

First of all, we'll introduce Vim's history.

Vim (/vɪm/; a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a clone, with additions, of Bill Joy's vi text editor program for Unix. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, based it on the source code for a port of the Stevie editor to the Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open-source software and is released under the Vim license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda. The Vim license is compatible with the GNU General Public License through a special clause allowing distribution of modified copies under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later license. (from wikipedia)

Install Vim

This part will help you install VIM in your system.

You can refer to Vim TuturialsPoint. I'll give you instructions here as well.

Installation on Windows

Go to download page. The page seems to be a bit 'ancient', but that doesn't matter. Go to 'MS-Windows' part to download gvim_x.x.xxxx.exe. Open the file and install it.

To check if you have installed VIM properly. Click Win + R, type powershell in the 'Run' window and hit return.

Type vim --version in powershell. You are supposed to see 'VIM - Vi IMproved x.x` in the output.

Installation on Mac OS

Go to MacVim and download MacVim. Open the file to install MacVim.

Open launchpad and search terminal, you should see the application. Open it and type vim --version. You should see VIM - Vi IMproved in the output

Installation on Debian Systems

Most of Debian Systems should have Vim installed already. To check it, just open your terminal and type vim --version. If you see VIM - Vi IMproved, then you are done.

If not, run sudo apt-get install vim in your terminal to have Vim installed.

Installation on Red Hat Systems

Refer to Installation on Debian Systems, just replace apt-get with yum.

Installation on Arch Systems

Refer to Installation on Debian Systems, just replace sudo apt-get install vim with sudo pacman -S vim.