Beasts slain, editors installed, here are more practical tips to help you along The Path of Learning Vim, if you still have the determination to follow (which I’m sure you do because the rewards are plentiful and the glory unmeasurable):

• Practice, Practice, Practice
• Prepare for the Dip
• Be in the Habit of Improving Your Vim. Feel when there’s pain in your workflow and adapt
• Learn to use and rely on Vim’s help
• If you haven’t done this already try vimtutor at least once

Excellent! Now that you are aware of the most common pitfalls on the path to Vim mastery let’s get yourself setup. In this chapter you’ll learn how to get started with a vanilla development environment in Vim that you can use and improve throughout the rest of our journey.

There are different paths that you can follow to get started with Vim, and each corresponds with different factions within The Order of Vim. Each with their own idiosyncrasies and approaches to using Vim, some of them purists, some others pragmatists, but all tied by the love and awesomeness of Vim.

It often happens with any (side)project that, sooner or later, enthusiasm wanes, and what used to be exciting and fun starts becoming a drag. This will often manifest as tiredness, difficulty to focus, a strong tendency to procrastination and a nagging feeling of lost opportunity as you slowly recount in your head all the other things and projects you could be pursuing with your time.

In my experience, there’s two ways to break this evil cycle:

As soon as I announced Wizards Use Vim at such an early stage of writing I started thinking about the best way to involve the community of readers in the writing and development of the book. Should I send email updates every time I publish a new version? Should I do it biweekly? Monthly? Should I wait till the book is ready?

Part of what I wanted to do with this book, and following the spirit of an article I wrote recently called Don’t Give Up! Keep Iterating, was to show how much work goes into a book. And specially how an ugly, gross, chaotic ball of mud can slowly be transformed into a beautiful sculpture through iterative work.

This is the format I settled for: The Wizard Logs! In this bi-weekly series I’ll share with you my adventures, glory and misfortunes of writing this new book on Vim. I’ll give you an update of the progress of the book, ideas I’ve been considering, things I’ve been pondering about, obstacles I had to avoid and dead-ends I smacked my face into.

I. must. write.

:D