“How do I get out of Vim?!”

Welcome to this journey into Vim! Learning Vim deeply can be one of the single biggest productivity boosts in your career, and this course is here to share 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.

If that’s how your first encounter went, you’re not alone. It’s also exactly what this site is for: a safe learning environment in the browser, where you can be confident that you won’t break anything.

Throughout this course, we’re going to learn Vim from first principles. We’re not just going to memorize 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)