Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my Vim Reference Guide ebook. This is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. It has more in common with cheatsheets than a typical text book. Topics like Regular Expressions and Macros have more detailed explanations and examples due to their complexity. I hope this guide would make it much easier for you to discover Vim features and learning resources than my own blundering experience.


Release offers🔗

To celebrate the new release, you can download PDF/EPUB versions of the ebook for FREE till 31-Aug-2024. You can still pay if you wish ;)

Two of my bundles are on sale as well:


What's new?🔗

  • Updated ebook for Vim version 9.1
  • Corrected typos
  • Some of the examples, descriptions and external links were updated
  • New cover image

Videos🔗

Visit this playlist for video demos on most of the topics from the ebook.


Testimonials🔗

Got several suggestions and feedback when my submission about this book reached the front page of Hacker News.

Great job on this! — rendall

Hi, great work releasing this! Trying to explain vim concisely is always an interesting challenge and I had a great time reading your attempt in this book. I always find it really interesting on how people try to group certain vim functions in a way that makes sense to people that don't use vim. I think you cover that idea pretty well in your 'Vim philosophy and features' section whilst not making it overly abstract and keeping it relatable. — doix

Neat stuff! One piece of feedback is that I would include "+p and "+yy in the copy and paste section. — mrpotato

I learnt regular expression by reading your books, thank you for the great work. — LamJH

A comment from another Hacker News thread:

I stumbled upon your vi post a few days ago, really like the style. Keep it up!


Vim prank🔗

Did you know that Vim has an easy mode? It can be rather hard to use for those already familiar with Vim modes. I wrote a blog post about this mode, which was interesting enough to reach the front page of Hacker News!


Table of Contents🔗

  1. Preface
  2. Introduction
  3. Insert mode
  4. Normal mode
  5. Command-line mode
  6. Visual mode
  7. Regular Expressions
  8. Macro
  9. Customizing Vim
  10. CLI options

Web version🔗

You can also read the book online here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/vim_reference/.


GitHub repo🔗

Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference for markdown source and other details related to the book.

info See also my blog post on how to customize pandoc for generating beautiful PDF/EPUB versions from GitHub style markdown.


Newsletter🔗

Subscribe to learnbyexample weekly — free newsletter covering programming resources, updates on what I am creating, tools, free ebooks and more, delivered every Friday.


Feedback and Errata🔗

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, Gumroad rating, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

You can reach me via:

Happy learning :)