By default, after opening vim you are in Normal mode. You have to enter normal mode before switching to the other three modes. Each other mode is accessible via Normal mode.

Where you can navigate in your file, like a passageway between different rooms. You can also use : and number to jump to a particular line of that number, :12 moves you to the 12th line. Let's say you type 23j, here you will go down 23 lines. If you want to apply certain movements several times you can use numbers before hjkl to move the number of times in that direction. I know it's wired but you will get used to it. To navigate around vim like blazing fast you can use h,j,k, and l. Wait for a second, you should learn how to move in vim first but you cannot learn everything at once, So take it bit by bit. This is because are 4 basic modes in Vim, understand it like a room.

You won't see anything happening even if you are typing. If you are in Linux or macOS, then open the terminal and type vim and enter.Īfter you are in Vim, you will surely be trying to type something right? else you are not a geek ) After that open CMD or terminal for windows 10 and type vim and enter. If you are on windows you have to add the vim.exe file's path to the environment variable PATH. To download vim you can go to the officialįirstly let us understand how to open vim from the command line or the terminal It takes time to get used to the commands and key combination of Vim.īut, let us get our feet wet in learning a few commands in Vim.

So that being said, vim is not easy to learn, you have to put some effort to reap the fruits of saving time in the longer run. This text editor is preinstalled in most Linux distributions and hence you could quickly edit some files without going anywhere. You can run program files from vim itself just with a few keystrokes. That makes it quite a great option to improve your terminal command skills and also for enhancing your Linux knowledge. Vim can be used in the terminal which means it can run terminal commands inside the editor interface. Vim is a text editor, not any text editor but a special and one of the fastest out there if you use it wisely. Terminal or Command line are quite important to learn and are powerful as well. We all are asked to use visual studio code and other rich looking editors as a beginners text editor or an IDE but that makes a habit of a rich and pleasing interface of running and debugging programs, and that is the reason we don't feel good to use command line or the terminal.

Vim text editor commands