“How do I get out of Vim?!”

Thanks for embarking on this journey into Vim! I can say, with honesty, that learning Vim deeply has been the single biggest productivity boost in my career so far. I am excited to be teaching what I’ve learned, and I’m looking forward to sharing the beauty of Vim with you.

Unfortunately, most people’s first experience with Vim is getting stuck there and not being able to do anything. This happens for two main reasons:

• Vim is usually set as the default editor on UNIX systems, so any program that gives you the opportunity to edit something (like git commit) will throw up a Vim window
• many online tutorials carelessly recommend using Vim to edit config files, making the assumption that the reader is already familiar with it

If you’ve never used Vim before, this can be really confusing. And sometimes, this bad experience causes folks to never touch Vim again.

Trust me, I’ve been there. In fact, the main reason I decided to build vimmer.io is to give folks a safe learning environment in the browser where they are confident that they won’t break anything.

Throughout this course, we’re going to learn Vim from first principles. We’re not just going to memorise keyboard shortcuts — we’re going to deeply understand Vim’s philosophy and history. That way, you can truly understand the editor, which sets you up for success when you start exploring Vim independently.

(it’s <esc>:q! to quit Vim without saving changes, by the way)