Vim is the one editor you'll ever need. It's a text editor that usually comes with every single Linux distro as default. If not vim̀ then it's usually vi. OK, this is something that all vim enthusiasts say, but I'm not THAT enthusiastic about it. Maybe I'll be there some day, though, since I only lately started using it actively.
Vim is many times the editor that people start using, but ends up abandoning because there's a LOT of things to learn when starting out.
The most used meme about vim is, "How to quit vim?"... It seems to be something that people has difficulties figuring out.
Hint: use :q to quit :)
We have verbs, e.g. actions we take and which can be performed on nouns:
Delete: d
Change: c
Yank: y
Visually select: v (V for whole line)
We have modifiers that are used to describe what we want to do to the nouns:
Inside: i
Around: a
Number: <NUM>
Searches for something and stops before it: t
Searches for something and lands on it: f
Find a string: /
We have the nouns that are something you do to:
Word: w
Sentence: s or )
Paragraph: p or }
Tag: t
Block: b
So how do we use these building blocks then? It's easy, just combine them together verb + modifier + noun, e.g:
Delete two words: d2w
Yank inside paragraph: yip
Note that you can use the same set up for movement as well, e.g. move 3 words forward: 3w
Open your file in vim: vim file
Write your changes to the file: :w
Quit without saving: :q!
Write your changes and exit vim: :wq
Save your file as: :saveas /path/where/to
Faster way to do :wq: ZZ
Vim configuration is something of an endless swamp, where once you get into, it's really hard to stop. For this workshop, we'll just start out with a minimalistic configuration. If you have vim already configured to your liking, it's fine, continue using that, but for those who doesn't have a sane configuration file, I'll provide the simple one here.
The vim configuration file exists at ~/.vimrc or ~/.vim/vimrc. You can type in :version to print out information about the locations.
Also :scriptnames will print out locations of different script files that vim has loaded.
The vim configuration file is just a line by line set up of commands to execute during startup. The double quote (") is a comment, and anything after the quote is ignored.
set nocompatible " good to have as first line, see :h nocompatible
set backspace=indent,eol,start " backspace can move beyond eol, indent and start of line
set whichwrap+=<,>,h,l " allow <,> and h, l to move to the previous/next line
set encoding=utf-8 nobomb " set the encoding used in vim, no BOM prepended
set fileformat=unix " set the file format to unix, e.g. <NL> (newline) is used instead of <CR><NL>
syntax on " syntax highlighting
set hlsearch " highlight all search results
set ignorecase " case insensitive search
set incsearch " show incremental search results
set number " show line numbers
set relativenumber " show the line numbering relative to where you are
set noswapfile " disable swap files
set showcmd " show the command being executed on the status bar
This is a very minimalistic configuration file, and I encourage you to investigate the many, many ways of configuring vim.