Project 701 ~ Vim

I am sure if you have heard of vim then you probably haven’t heard good things. I mean hell there are jokes about just exiting vim. Vim (Vi IMproved) is a clone of the vi text editor made by Bill Joy for Unix. When I was first exposed to a text editor (nano) I wasn’t very fond of it. It didn’t make sense why I would use a text editor over what I was currently using at the time (atom). This of course was before I had ever touched a virtual machine or a terminal for that matter, so the concept was simply foreign to me. The first time I had heard of vim was when my study mates were joking around about trying to exit vim with the esc key or ctrl+q. My first encounter with vim was when my friend Sam was making a program in his terminal during one of our classes. I was interested since it looked like nano but had completely different quick commands. I don’t know what it was about vim, but as far as I knew it had me liking it much more than nano did.

When working with virtual machines, at least when you’re using ssh to connect to them, you can’t necessarily open an editor like visual studio code or atom. This is the primary reason why I decided to add vim to my toolbox. I don’t use vim as much as I should outside of working with virtual machines (or my raspberry pi), partially due to the fact that I just don’t know it well enough to be comfortable having it as my primary editor. Since I will be working with a linux virtual machine I will be utilizing my basic skills in vim for editing files. After a quick ddg search I found an interactive guide, and a rich wiki page which I will use for future reference. When I say I know the basics I am meaning the basics (i to enter insert mode, :wq to write/quit, and :q! to quick without saving). Both the guide and the wiki suggest to do the tutorial that is shipped with vim which is accessed via :help tutor within vim or vimtutor from the terminal, so I will do a run through of that to get up to speed with my vim skills for this project.