8 Excellent Free Books to Learn Vim

Last Updated on May 29, 2024

5. UNIX Text Processing by Dale Dougherty, Tim O’Reilly

This book shows the reader how to effectively prepare written documents, especially in the process of producing book-length documents.

The authors demonstrate popular tools available to meet this task. The book also examines text processing in terms of problems and solutions: the problems faced by a writer undertaking a large writing project and the solutions offered by using the resources and power of a computer system.

Chapters cover:

• UNIX Fundamentals.
• Learning vi.
• nroff and troff.
• The ms Macros.
• The mm Macros.
• Advanced Editing.
• Formatting with tbl.
• Typesetting Equations with eqn.
• Drawing Pictures.
• A Miscellany of UNIX Commands.
• Let the Computer Do the Dirty Work.
• The awk Programming Language.
• Writing nroff and troff Macros.
• Figures and Special Effects.
• What’s in a Macro Package?
• An Extended ms Macro Package.
• Putting It All Together.

While this book was published way back in 1997, it still provides a wealth of relevant information.

The book is published under the Creative Commons’ Attribution License.

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6. A Byte of Vim by Swaroop C H

“A Byte of Vim” is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor (version 7), even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard.

The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it.

The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful, such as windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer’s editor, how to extend Vim with your own plugins, and more.

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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7. Vi IMproved – Vim: The Tutorial by Steve Oualline

This is a complete reference text to the Vim text editor.

The book provides a wealth of information in its 572 pages.

The material in this book is incorporated into The Vim Tutorial and Reference.

This book is published under the Open Publication License (OPL).

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8. The Woodnotes Guide to Vim for Writers by Randall Wood

Chapters include:

• Why Vim for Writers?
• Gvim vs Vim.
• Line Wrapping and Text Width.
• Files (Opening, Savings, etc.)
• General Editing of Text.
• Getting Around with the Cursor.
• Scrolling.
• Bookmarks (“Marks”).
• Selecting Text, Cutting and Pasting.
• Searching and Replacing.
• Using Ranges.
• Multiple Windows, Buffers, and Tabs.
• Inserting Special Characters.
• Dealing with DOS, UNIX conversion problems.
• Spell Checking.
• Macros.
• Learning more about Vim.

This document is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

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Pages in this article:
Page 1 – VIM User Manual and more books
Page 2 – UNIX Text Processing and more books