Hello everybody,

I just started really using vim the other day. I'd used it before for simple editing, but got sick of my programming interfaces (Eclipse, Quanta) taking up so much memory (and only running with X/KDE), so I tried it out more thoroughly. It really is a great program.

Anyway, a few questions:

1) Is there another way of getting out of insert mode, other than hitting ESC? It seems a little too much a reach when I'm on the home row. I bet I could map another key for it, but don't know how, or which key would be good.
2) Are there any good vim forums out there that I should know about.
3) What are the "can't live without" plugins that I should get? I've got a file explorer plugin, color plugin, and the Tlist plugin... BTW: I work with PHP, HTML, Perl and SQL files regularly.
4) How long should I continue working with vim before moving on to gvim? To learn linux, I forced myself to use the command line for everything, and then learned X. I feel that's the best way. Is this going to be the same?

Thank you all,
James

Not that I know much about vim/gvim either, but I believe you can start using gvim right away. I don't think there's anything that you need to learn from vim before you switch over. In fact, I much prefer gvim over vim because gvim will let you spawn new windows off of one terminal.

vim reads from ~/.vimrc. gvim reads from that and ~/.gvim.

Also, check out the vimrc sample under /usr/share/vim/vim63/vimrc_example.vim

I just copy that to /home/user/.vimrc and I'm good to go.

I've never used gvim, tried a few times... I just like the console vim.

--Shade

If you don't like hitting Esc to get into command mode or hitting Insert (or i) to get into Insert mode, you can set mappings in your .vimrc file. Look into the :map and the :map! switches.

:map is for Command mode and :map! is for Insert. So, for example, if:

:map! <F11> Hello, my name is Mr. Burns.

was in your .vimrc file, then if you were typing and hit the F11 key, then the sentence, 'Hello, my name is Mr. Burns.' would be printed.

You can also set commands, like:

:map! <F12> <Esc>:set nu!<Esc>i

This command Escapes to commands mode, enters the command :set nu!, then re-enters insert mode, if you hit the F12 key while typing.

Play around with it, you can do a lot with vim.

Plugins I use:

Vim-Latex for typsetting documents.
Word Complete.
Spellcheck.

Very neat stuff... Thanks alot guys. I really think this might be the editor I stick with from now on

-James

ps. Has anybody mapped the <Esc> key to something else that they find more efficient? What is that key?

A lot of people map it to the windows or CAPS lock key.

--Shade

I mapped it over to the caps lock key and I couldn't be happier. I'm working so much faster than before... Great stuff !!!

^ I know I have no life when swapping the esc and caps lock key makes me want to jump for joy

-James

Hehe... I know what you mean. It's such a great feeling when you tweak an app the way you want it AND get it to work!

http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/12.vi/paper.html

http://www.networkcomputing.com/unix...l/009/009.html

http://www.vim.org/

http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html