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Comment by rottyguy | Hacker News Reader

Are there books and/or resources you could recommend? tx

Have you ever worked in vim? If you haven't, the way I learned the basics was by watching these videos: http://derekwyatt.org/vim/tutorials/

To get used to the hjkl keys, I would recommend you to download tetris and change the movement keys from the default arrows to hjkl and play for a week a little bit every day. I got used to very very fast. Some people recommend http://vim-adventures.com/ but I have never used it.

vim has a few very interesting plugins that I recommend installing, especially if you are interested in working with vim every day instead of using it only through ssh. If you end up going with vim and like it, answer me and I will go over the plugins I like the most.

Will definitely take a look at vim so would appreciate the guidance.

The first thing I would recommend you is to build the vimrc yourself. Forget about the huge github vimrcs available out there. Check them out and see if there are things you like, but build your own vimrc.

The second thing is if you are planning on using plugins (which I recommend), use a plugin manager like https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug. They make it extremely easy to install plugins, and updating them will be a breeze.

vim is not for everyone. Some people enjoy using some vim emulation for their favorite editor. Just because using vim is very common in the Linux world doesn't mean you should. I still recommend that people get used to the keys.

I would personally not install any plugins right away. I would get used to vim for at least 2 weeks and see from there what you want to do. That said, the plugins I've found the most interesting and helpful have been the following:

NERDTree (shows your project's structure. Similar to what you would find in sublime or any modern IDE)

NERDcommenter (allows you to comment/uncomment lines or groups of lines automatically)

CtrlP (fuzzy search of files in your current folder or subfolders, or inside the current repository)

ultisnips (snippets)

vim-surround (allows you to insert parentheses, brackets, quotes, etc. around the selected area)

auto-pairs (or something equivalent. Basically, creating the closing bracket, quote, etc. every time you open bracket, quote, etc.)

vim-easymotion (this is a very interesting plugin. I would recommend that you check it out to get an idea of what it does. It's useful when trying to navigate around the screen)

syntastic (syntax checker for multiple languages)

tagbar (if you enjoy having a small summary of all the functions and variables in the current file, this is for you)

supertab (vim uses c-p and c-n to complete words in insert mode. supertab allows you to complete with tab instead of c-p and c-n. If you are used to using tab in other editors, this will help you)

vim-fugitive (quite nice if you are use git. Helps you comparing newer and older revisions, for example. You can open a modified file with vim, write :Gdiff and get the uncommited changes)

youcompleteme (the best code completion tool available. Has very good context completion)

vim-colorschemes (a collection of a million different colorschemes to try)

vim-hybrid (my favorite dark colorscheme by far)

Regarding vim, I enjoyed this quite a bit: http://www.vimgenius.com/

..but mostly, I learned from videos. There are plenty of them and some are really good.

Vim itself had a decent built-in tutorial, just launch vim and I think its the default prompt. People have gamified vim hot keys too, check out shortcut foo and Google 'vim' golf.

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