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.
When I learn something new I often get into this frenzy of consumption of knowledge where I need to read every book, article, video on the topic I can get my hands on. Every new book is a promise of magnificent and wondrous abilities which are just waiting to be learnt just a couple of pages away. I imagine myself inbued of this new power to be more awesome at coding and I can’t help to feel giddy with excitement.
Of course the excitement fades eventually and all that’s left then is the determination to finish what I started. Finishing things. What a great skill to practice. If you haven’t got around setting up your new year’s resolution that one might be it.
Back to topic. As you may have noticed from my favorite new topic in this blog, for the past few months I’ve been investing most of my dad free time learning more about vim. Thus I’ve read a bunch of books and I’m in a great place to give you some recommendations.
Here are my favorite books on vim in the order in which I read them with some brief reviews and some advice on whether any of these books is the right one for you.
