Learn Vimscript the Hard Way | Hacker News Reader

Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com

Kind of off topic, but I'm have been a big fan of Steve Losh's writing. In particular his long, structured essays on technical topics have been a delightful read[0]. Sadly, he hasn't posted anything late 2013. Does anyone have clue on why's that?

[0] - His "Caves of Clojure" series is one of my favorites - http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/

I know Vimscript is sort of terrible, but as someone who's written a Vim plugin recently I found Learn Vimscript the Hard Way to be an incredibly valuable resource. I wish it went into even more depth with each of its chapters, but for someone new to Vimscript/VimL it's fantastic.

I agree. I went through it a year or so back, and it helped me go from knowing very little vimscript, to writing a 200-line plugin, to modifying it to take advantage of vim built-in behavior (like filetypes and <cword>) to be about five lines.

If you're thinking of doing any vim scripting, I'd absolutely recommend it!

This and the IBM one* seem to be the only tutorial-style resources on Vimscript available online. Does anyone know of any others? Otherwise I've often resorted to looking through the popular plugins for inspiration/idioms, but perhaps that's not a bad thing.

* IBM Vimscript series: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/libraryview.js...

I've only just dipped my toes into Vimscript but I find Google's Style Guide to be useful.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/vimscriptg...

Steve Losh has some good articles on vim already. Highly recommended.

So, not to sound negative or anything, but I'm pretty sure vimscript will become deprecated once Neovim is used widely.

But when do we expect this to happen? Why would normal vim users change?

There is a difference between neovim favoring lua, and vim still existing. Plus their official stance is that vimscript is a worthy language for it's job and support for it isn't going anywhere.

Just curious, do you use vim daily? Not asking to be a tool - genuinely curious if that's your opinion as a user or as an observer.

Vim is one of the most successful open-source software programs of all time. It's been going strong for over two decades.

Neovim aims to replace it, but it is not a new generation of vim, it is a new and completely different project by different people, that may or may not succeed.

I wish them the best of luck, but it is by no means clear that Neovim will ever achieve close to the user base that vim has today.

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