Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim

by Drew Neil

Turn Vim into a full-blown development environment using Vim 8’s new features and this sequel to the beloved bestseller Practical Vim. Integrate your editor with tools for building, testing, linting, indexing, and searching your codebase. Discover the future of Vim with Neovim: a fork of Vim that includes a built-in terminal emulator that will transform your workflow. Whether you choose to switch to Neovim or stick with Vim 8, you’ll be a better developer.

A serious tool for programmers and web developers, no other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency. Make Vim the centerpiece of a Unix-based IDE as you discover new ways to work with Vim 8 and Neovim in more than 30 hands-on tips.

Execute tasks asynchronously, allowing you to continue in Vim while linting, grepping, building a project, or running a test suite. Install plugins to be loaded on startup—or on-demand when you need them—with Vim 8’s new package support. Save and restore sessions, enabling you to quit Vim and restart again while preserving your window layout and undo history. Use Neovim as a drop-in replacement for Vim—it supports all of the features Vim 8 offers and more, including an integrated terminal that lets you quickly perform interactive commands. And if you enjoy using tmux and Vim together, you’ll love Neovim’s terminal emulator, which lets you run an interactive shell in a buffer. The terminal buffers fit naturally with Vim’s split windows, and you can use Normal mode commands to scroll, search, copy, and paste. On top of all that: Neovim’s terminal buffers are scriptable.

With Vim at the core of your development environment, you’ll become a faster and more efficient developer.

Genres: Programming, Computer Science, Technology, Nonfiction, Computers, Productivity, Coding

190 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Povilas Balzaravičius · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Drew Neil's book named "Practical VIM" was like a Bible for me. I've kept it on my desk for a full year and was re-reading one or other chapter periodically. This book is a bit different. It covers a set of quality plug-ins (half of those are available on Tim Pope's Github profile). Author leads the reader via continuous engineering work flow and integrates each of the plug in.

After I've read the book I found answers to some questions which I wanted to solve for a long time but was too lazy to figure out how to do that. I really like that advices are language agnostic and suitable for most programmers. In overall - nice reading, but will be outdated in a few years.

[Julio Biason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be honest and say that I did expect a bit more about this book.

It is not a book talking about changes in the last few years in the VIM workflow; it's more about the changes in the ecosystem of VIM. So instead of focusing on new features (say, from last version and current version), it focuses a lot more on plugins.

Not that focusing on (recent) plugins is a bad thing: There were changes in the infrastructure of VIM that allowed the creation of more modern and flexible plugins and talking about them is a good thing. But, again, I expected a more focused book on VIM than plugins. If the title were "Craft your VIM environment on VIM 8 and Neovim", it would fit perfectly on what the book presents, for example.

In all, it's not a bad book, although it requires that you know VIM beforehand.

[Matt Diephouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some useful tips in here, but this is more… subjective than Practical Vim. This book is largely about plugins, and I’m not interested in all the plugins it mentioned. Still good, just not as great as the first book.

[Борис Кучин · Rating 2 out of 5]

Маленькая книжка про современной состояние Vim (часть про 8, часть про NeoVim).
Нашёл несколько плагинов, на которые раньше внимания не обращал, но это, в общем-то, всё.
Читать явно необязательно.

[Katrina Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, so context... I have only a very basic understanding of how to use `vi`--like, most of my knowledge works on `vi` as much as it works on `vim`. I've done stuff with vimtutor--and forgotten most of it shortly after finishing vimtutor. So I am a bit shocked at how much more vim/neovim can do beyond my expectations of it. Still... I got this book, and another, in order to try to be a bit less basic in my understanding of how to do stuff with Vim

I bought this book along with Practical Vim. This one arrived after Practical Vim. I half expected this one to be the one read after "Practical Vim" with it building on the basics in Practical Vim. I then looked at the "skill level" dial on the book... and noticed Practical Vim was medium and Modern Vim was easy. Which uh... okay then. I suppose if I was looking at these in a brick and mortar shop I'd see those little dials

So uh... if you read this one, read it _BEFORE_ Practical Vim

That being said, the contents of this book are somewhat superceded by the existence of Space Vim and Doom Vim.... buuuuuuutt....

The whole part where you are setting up modules that are much easier provided by (at least) Space Vim does help explain what all of those parts do, and does give a decent understanding of what to do with the similar modules you have going for you in Space Vim

Creating an educational tool via setting up and using functionality that is usually already set up for you. Giving a bit of a better understanding of it

I will note there are a few parts of this book that seem outright wrong. I'm not certain what parts though--so I cannot say if this book on a programming tool/concept is mostly wrong, or just slightly wrong. All programming texts have at least a small amount of "wrong"--as anybody who has worked with BASIC/Assembly write-in programs from magazines/books will note from debugging a write-in entry despite entering it into the computer perfectly. It is just part of what you expect with works on programming tools/concepts. Keeps the mind sharp

The book does mention that it expects a lot of the topics to be out of date shortly after publishing... but the thing about a lot of stable concepts in the UNIX/Workalike environment is that those systems tend to be incredibly boring. Which ends up being a selling point "this system and environment is really really boring while doing its job"--leading to applause of the crowd

There is an appendix where it does hint at various future developments they would have wanted to add if they were at the "boring dependable" stage to make the books content reliable. No appendix explaining what the Dwarrow were doing during the events of "Farmer Giles of Ham", however--still have to look for that

This book, despite the existence of Space Vim, does seem to be an okayish entry point for doing stuff with Vim and NeoVim. With anything here needing to be further expanded anyways

Oh right! And finally something covering NeoVim that actually explains _REAL_ reasons to be interested in NeoVim. Usually with that one it is "NeoVim is Vim with support of Lua plugins/scripting!"... which uh... is a great reason to _NOT_ use NeoVim. Look... Lua really really sucks as a language to have to interact with. Yeah, it is better than JavaScript... but one could state that Intercal is a better language than JavaScript with very little to argue against that statement. Interacting with Lua is somehow even worse than interacting with BASH. Yeah, I said it, Lua sucks worse than BASH

This book lists the various other features and offerings that NeoVim applies that are actually reasons to want to do stuff with it. While also mentioning that you can also do stuff with it using Ruby and Python--and even implying you could prolly interact with it using elisp

So I'm actually glad for that portion of the book being there

[Ravi Sinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another gem from Drew Neil. I personally did not pay much attention to moving over to Neovim, or even to some plugins such as FZF (I compared, and realized that my existing Ctrl-P can do a good enough job at fuzzy searching already, and that most of the keyboard shortcuts to navigate up and down in the filtered list as well as to open the files in horizontal or vertical splits work identically, despite requiring a little more typing than FZF because of the way Ctrl-P does fuzzy matching), but it's still always nice to learn about what's new around the block in the community. Not every plugin would be a requirement for everybody, and not every plugin would even appeal to everybody, but I enjoyed the walkthroughs of the Projectionist and Dispatch plugins. Even if you're not going to use a feature, it's nice to learn that they exist. A lot of emphasis in this book is on plugins that run asynchronously, and maybe many programmers would have the need to make that switch. The sessions feature is a lifesaver and was very nice to learn about too.

[Andrew Barchuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I expected more of the book it was still interesting and valuable. Hopefully will pove to be practically useful as well. I wish it had covered a more topics and be more in-depth while being more succinct. Right now way too much space is taken be repetitive instructions which don't add much value. I feel like the form of tips is a poor match for the content of the book, contrary to Practical Vim.

[Ietrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mediocre book that is not in anyway better than what Google can offer. Still, I loved the idiotic title: Modern Vim. So the reader won't be confused with the Medieval Venetian Vim of the 15th century, clearly inspired by the Ancient Greek Aristotelian vi, programmed without spaces, punctuation or minuscules. Clearly the Venetian Vim was an improvement following the philosophy of Gutenberg's friend, Knuth and his literate programming.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really solid modern advice. Although at times it feels like a glorified blog post rather than a deep dive. And often turns into “use this plugin by tpope”. Solid book and I learned a fair amount. But not a must read for vim nerds.

[Carlos Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Might be good for beginners, but if you’ve been playing with com for a while, it does not add much, or, at least not to my style of usage.

It’s also a little outdated, as to be expected from a book from 2018.

Other that that, it’s a good book.

[Jose Sanz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, it's ok if you don't already have your configuration, but as other comment said, has the potential to be outdated. It is already outdated in some parts.
It can be useful if you haven't fought your way with plugins already.

[Sergey Shishkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice continuation of Practical Vim.

[Željko Filipin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful overview of new features of Vim 8 and Neovim. I've switched to Neovim since I've started reading the book.

[Petro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has some nice tips around vim8 and neovim. The section on plugin specific autocommands is really nice.

[amir_salar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what i expected, and not perfect!

[Alexander Popov · Rating 2 out of 5]

really nice starting pack for neovim in ~2019

[LustHeroin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even guy with emacs need know your rivals. Thanks for good small book. I like it from start to end

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very thin book that didn't teach me much at all. Most of the content is around third party vim plugins which will date very badly, as the author admits. There is some information that might be useful on the vim8 pack system, but I knew that already. The only thing I really learned from this book was a better understanding of the autocommand function in VIM script. A bit dissapointing overall.