Learn Vim from the best Vim course in 2021. Start coding on the command line using the powerful VI editor with this amazing, easy-to-follow course. If you want to develop for the Unix / Linux Systems VI, this is the de facto editor that you must learn to use. In this article, we will list some of the best vim color schemes and also how to download and install a new color scheme in your Vim editor. In addition, we will also learn how to use the pre-installed color scheme in Vim editor. Check out following few color schemes to improve your Vim experience: Solarized Dark; Gruvbox; Ayu; Palenight; Inkpot; Monokai. Vim supports hundreds of programming languages and file formats making it one of the best cross-platform code editor. Read Also: 18 Best IDEs for Programmers and Developers Although Vim is continuously being developed to become a much better text editor, many users have now created several Vim-like editors with fewer but powerful and usable. This Vim book is just the right choice for those who are looking for something advanced yet containing the best strategies for learning vim editor. If you have a basic knowledge about Vim text editor and want to improve your skills under the correct guideline, this is the book. VSCode has a Vim extension. Not only does it emulate nearly all of Vim’s core features, but it also adds in some of the most popular Vim plugins as well, including commentary, surround, easymotion.

One of the things that makes vim great is that it can be extendedthrough plugins. There are plugins for more than you would expect. Ihave gathered together the 15 best plugins. I’ve included these pluginsas part of my ultimate VIMconfiguration which has beenfeatured on many sites and is hosted ongithub. I’ve also begun a seriesof posts on some of these plugins includingsnipmate andNerdCommenter.

General

SuperTab

Do all your insert-mode completion with Tab.

ShowMarks

Visually shows the location of marks.
Marks are useful for jumping back and forth between interesting pointsin a buffer, but can be hard to keep track of without any way to seewhere you have placed them. ShowMarks hopefully makes life easier byplacing a sign in the leftmost column of the buffer. The sign indicatesthe label of the mark and its location.
It can be toggled on and off and individual marks can behidden(effectively removing them).

SearchComplete

Provides tab completion while inside the “/” search

Programmer

Tag List

taglist.vim : Source code browser (supports C/C++, java, perl, python,tcl, sql, php, etc).
Requires the exuberantctags utility.

SQLComplete

Completion for the SQL language includes statements, functions,keywords, operators and database options which it draws from the currentSQL syntax file in use. Vim ships with 9 different SQL syntax files(Oracle, Informix, MySQL, SQL Anywhere, …). You can choose differentSQL dialects using the command (see :h sql-dialects):

The NERD Commenter

A plugin that allows for easy commenting of code for many (nearly all)filetypes.

VCSCommand

VIM 7 plugin useful for manipulating files controlled by CVS, SVN, SVKand git within VIM, including committing changes and performing diffsusing the vimdiff system.

Surround

All about “surroundings”: parentheses, brackets,quotes, XML tags, and more.The plugin provides mappings to easily delete, change and add suchsurroundings in pairs. El burlador de sevilla english.

MatchIT

The matchit.vim script allows you to configure % to match more than justsingle characters. You can match words and even regularexpressions.Also, matching treats strings and comments (as recognized by the syntaxhighlightingmechanism) intelligently.

snippetsEMU

Attempts to emulate some of the behaviour of ‘Snippets’ from the OS Xeditor TextMate, in particularthe variable bouncing and replacement behaviour.

PHP

Smarty Syntax File

Syntax file for Smarty, the template engine forPHP.

PHP Syntax File

Syntax file for PHP.

PHP Folding

This script can fold PHP functions and/or classes, properties withtheir PhpDoc,
without manually adding marker style folds ({{{ and }}}).

CheckSyntax

Check syntax when saving a file (PHP). Also supports ruby, tex, etc.

PDV- phpDocumentor for Vim

Provides really comfortable generation of phpDocumentor doc blocks forPHP

External Resources

Hot tips to bring the awesomeness of Visual Studio Code to Vim.

Front-Matter

I want to start by saying, this is not an editor-shame article. You can use whatever text editor you want. It really doesn’t matter. I’m only writing this because I found a level of productivity in Vim that I haven’t had in any of the editors I used before (Sublime Text, Atom or VSCode).

If you’ve heard about Vim, and want to try it out, I hope this article can provide a bit of familiarity you’d find from VSCode.

Why Vim?

There are lots of reasons to use Vim, so here’s a few of mine.

Keep your hands at 10 and 2

When you are solely using the keyboard, there is going to be an inherent speed boost just from not having to physically move your hands. And hey, maybe you’re a black belt in mouse movement, and you can move back in forth with a speed invisible to the naked eye. For the rest of us simple humans, it takes time.

Let’s do some quick math.

It takes 600ms to move my hand from the “home keys” to the mouse. On average, for sake of argument, I do that once a minute while I’m writing code. Whether that be to scroll, navigate to a new file, or something similar.

600 (wasted time in ms) x 60 (times per hour) x 5 (hours I am actually coding) = 180,000ms wasted =

3. Minutes. Every. Day.

Yeah, okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, but, those 3 minutes could be spent writing a function, or refactoring code, not flailing your hand about like you're Harry Potter!

Speed

My favorite quote that describes what it’s like to code in VIM:

“Code at the speed of thought”

Vim is built around the idea that you are directly communicating with your computer. You tell it what you want, and it does it for you. The biggest eye-opener for me was this little tidbit:

To delete everything in between two objects (parentheses, quotes, etc), it's as simple as:

di'

That’s just the surface of amazing shorthand things you can do with Vim.

I’m a real programmer!

Part of the journey of learning VIM is exposing yourself to how UNIX works. I’m under the impression that the more you expose yourself to things like bash, the better programmer you are going to be.

Chances are, you have a pretty sweet command line setup. Wouldn’t it be nice if your code editor and your command line worked in concert?

How do you exit Vim?

Probability is high that you’ve ever edited a file on a Linux server, and couldn’t figure out how to exit the file. Let’s say, for example, changing an SSH key on Digital Ocean. If you know VIM…you don’t have to worry about that!

The real reason I switched to Vim

Honesty time. The real catalyst for wanting to switch to Vim was watching Kyle Mathews (creator of Gatsby.js) using it during a demo.

VS Code Features and their equivalents

Convinced? Cool, here’s some tools!

Plugin System

Vim by itself is pretty barebones. In order to add plugins, we have to have a mechanism to manage them. Enter Plug:

Note: There are a few plugin managers out there. I landed on Plug for no particular reason. I like it, and I’ve had no issues with it. FYI, Vundle is deprecated.

File Search

There has been a bunch of solutions for file searching over the years, as indicated by the multitude of answers in forums. I tried a couple of different ones, but landed on this combination:

Fuzzy Finder(fzf) + Ripgrep

Fzf is a really well built/maintained fuzzy search that works in both the command line and vim.

Note: You may see Ag(Silver searcher) in a lot of articles, however the Ag related vim plugin is no longer maintained, so it's suggested to use RipGrep.

Intellisense

The auto-completion system (Intellisense) in VSCode is arg

Best Vim