Text Processing at Maximum Speed and Power
Ratings1
Average rating3
A guide to vi and Vim covers the basics of text-editing along with information on such topics as macros, buffers, Unix commands, scripts, gvim, and vi clones. Learn about Vim's enhancements and its availablity for many other operating systems.
Reviews with the most likes.
Definitely showing its age; the first third of the book exclusively discusses vi (not vim), to the extent that a lot of it becomes superceded by the rest of the book. The author has a serious hard-on for troff
, one in three examples of how to do things with vi(m) is “how to format for troff”, which doesn't help the relevancy issue.
Because I was reading on an ebook, the other egregious problem was a huge chunk of the book devoted to vile, kyle, elvis, and other weird vi-clones, none of which really seem to exist anymore. It's really hard to skim on an ebook, which is why I mention this.
BUT after you've got past all my nitpicking, the book is pretty good. If you're already an advanced vim-user, you probably won't get much out of it, but it's worth a skim to see if you're missing any fundamentals. I'd highly suggest the chapter on ex-commands, even if you don't look at the rest of book; I finished the book this morning and have already found a use for them.
I wanted to recommend this book, but honestly you'd probably do better just searching for vim blog posts.