Vim Reference Guide 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. Visit https://youtu.be/4ybTvTr3SQc for a short video about the book.

See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.

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

See also my curated list on Vim for beginner to advanced level learning resources.

• You can purchase the pdf/epub versions of the book using these links:
  • https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/vim_reference_guide
  • https://leanpub.com/vim_reference_guide
• You can also get the book as part of these bundles:
  • Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex
  • All books bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
    • Includes all my programming books
• See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for a list of other books

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters.

The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdfs from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.

For web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/vim_reference/

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!

⚠️ ⚠️ Please DO NOT submit pull requests. Main reason being any modification requires changes in multiple places.

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, 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:

• Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference/issues
• E-mail: echo 'bGVhcm5ieWV4YW1wbGUubmV0QGdtYWlsLmNvbQo=' | base64 --decode
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

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

• Vim help files — user and reference manuals
• /r/vim/ and vi.stackexchange — helpful forums
• tex.stackexchange — for help on pandoc and tex related questions
• canva — cover image
• Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
• oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner — for optimizing images
• Rodrigo Girão Serrão — for feedback and suggestions
• Andy — for cover image suggestions
• Inkscape for favicon
• mdBook — for web version of the book
  • mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each page
  • minify-html — for minifying html files
  • MDN: kbd — CSS for <kbd> tag

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file.