A brief history of the Vim and Vi editors

TODO history

Installation

Many Linux distributions come pre-installed with Vim. However, if yours doesn’t have it, you can do so by

Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S vim
Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Linux Mint): sudo apt install vim
MacOS: brew install vim
Windows: please install linux

Open up Vim, and you’ll be presented with this screen.

TODO add image

Now, simply enter :(colon), your cursor will appear at the bottom of the editor. Insert q there and hit Enter to quit Vim. You have now successfully installed vim and learnt how to open it and exit it!

Basic concepts of Vim

In Vim, there are 4 modes, namely Normal, Insert, Command and Visual.

Normal: The mode where you navigate around your editor, jump between and delete words and lines. You mostly go to all other modes from here.
Insert: The mode where you insert text to the buffer.
Command: The mode where you execute commands in Vim such as save, quit, etc.
Visual: The mode where you select and copy text.

We will learn about each of these modes to some depth in this tutorial.

Normal

This is the mode where you navigate around your vim editor.