Mastering Vim: Build a software development environment with Vim and Neovim

by Ruslan Osipov

Mastering Vim, reviewed by Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, covers usage of Vim and Neovim, showcases relevant plugins, and teaches Vimscript Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript. By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages. Mastering Vim is written for beginner, intermediate, and expert developers.The book will teach you to effectively embed Vim in your daily workflow. No prior experience with Python or Vim is required.

Genres: Programming, Coding

330 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2018

About the author

Ruslan Osipov is a software engineer at Google, an avid traveler, and a part-time blogger. He is a self-taught engineer; he started publishing personal Vim notes in 2012, and became more and more interested in the intricacies of the editor and its applications in optimizing development workflows.

Reviews

[Andrew Radev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I got a free copy of this book for review purposes.

It's a solid book that goes through a lot of important stages of using Vim -- from basic buffer movements to working with large projects. Vimtutor limits itself to general-purpose movements and manipulation, and the built-in help is an excellent reference, but a book like "Mastering Vim" is a good missing link for learning what neither of the two covers -- workflows, plugins, and good practices for a modern Vimmer.

In some cases, I wish there were more references to the docs and explanations of built-ins. Most plugins looked into are also quite popular, so if you've already got a solid Vim workflow and have been keeping up with blog posts and feature announcements, you might not get a lot out of the book. There's a good intro to Vimscript, but, as the author himself says, it's just an intro and a book like "Learn Vimscript the Hard Way" might be a better choice if you're interested in it.

I'd strongly recommend this book to relative beginners who either don't know Vim at all or only have a passing knowledge of it from ssh-ing into servers and using it by necessity. I'd also suggest it to "old-school" Vim users who haven't been keeping up with modern plugins and Vim 8 features. They could find a good guide to refreshing their configs and picking up new workflows.

[Jordan Cotter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruslan Introduces the concept of "having a conversation with your editor". Thinking that way has really improved my ability to use combinations of commands where before I depended on brute memorization as if the combination was a command itself.

All the plugins mentioned may not work exactly as described suggesting the book may be a bit dated, but the value of this book is how to think about vim and what it's capable of and that is timeless.

I was a little disappointed to find that, despite "neovim" being in the title, only one short chapter is devoted to it.

But this book has boosted my productivity and I wish I had read it years ago.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming only from vimtutor and vim-adventures, I thought this book would be tough to go through. It was very well structured, full of great examples and unexpectedly easy to follow. Even though vimscript and neovim (or any other supersets of it) are a bit over my head for now, they did spark my interest, or attention to say the least.

[Joe Michalak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a great overview for using Vim. I would start by using simple tutorials (like Vim Tutorial), and then read this book to gain the next level of understanding and functionality. It's especially nice that the book covers gVim as well.

[Stein Karlsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, too many external modules for my taste