O'Reilly Network: vim

Published on O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/)
See this if you're having trouble printing code examples

Date: Nov 18 1999
From: Stuart
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: vim

Tim,

Like most sane people in the computer industry, I recognize yourselves, O'Reilly, as one of the few companies who produce books worth touching (along with Addison Wesley). But amazingly, for me anyway, no one has a book on vim!! You have vi Second Edition, which I am close to buying, but not close enough. A book explaining the added features of vim, syntax highlighting, multiple windows, config file formats, etc., would be a gem for me. There are the help pages, but they are terse. Someone explaining these in a well presented fashion would instantly attract several buyers that I can think of--it is one the most used editors on the Linux platform.

It really is THE book that I want, and I can't find it anywhere!!

Please help, or tell me that the vi book will soon be in two halves, one devoted specially to vim.

Thanks,

Stuart

Stuart,

Have you actually looked at the sixth (not second!) edition of the vi book? It has a chapter of about 40 pages on vim, not counting the overview in the chapter that compares and contrasts the four major vi extended clones (nvi, vim, elvis, and vile, all of which have their own substantial chapters to boot), and an appendix that lists set options for vi and all the clones.

If you've looked at the book and want even more information, please let me know. But I think you'll find that most of what you want is there. Section headings from the chapter include:

Important Command Line Arguments
Online Help and other Documentation
Initialization
Multiwindow Editing
GUI Interfaces
Command Line History and Completion
Tag Stacks
Multiwindow Editing
Extended Regular Expressions
Edit-Compile Speedup
Syntax Highlighting
Smart Indenting
Include File Searching

It's true that it doesn't go into gory details of the .vimrc file format and options, but the online doc does a lot of that. And there is in fact an appendix that lists the most important set options for vi and all the clones, including all of the important vim options.

So, while this isn't half the book devoted specifically to vim, it is at least a quarter. And frankly, if you had a book that was on vim alone, it would have to repeat a lot of the vi material anyway, so you've really got as much or more as you would have in a standalone book on vim. And if you think that elvis is, well, vile, and that anyone not using vim must be turning green with nvi, you can just skip the additional material that's there for the benefit of users of vim's cousins.

I have to confess that I still use the original vi, happily. It's such a great program. But your email and looking at the section on vim in Arnold Robbins' new version of the book has made me think it may be time to download a copy of vim instead. Thanks for the question.

--Tim

Return to: Ask Tim Archive