3 Excellent Free Books to Learn VimL

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

VimL is a powerful scripting language of the Vim editor. You can use this dynamic, imperative language to design new tools, automate tasks, and redefine existing features of Vim. At an entry level, writing VimL consists of editing the vimrc file. Users can mould Vim to their personal preferences. But the language offers so much more; writing complete plugins that transform the editor. Learning VimL also helps improve your efficiency in every day editing.

VimL supports many common language features: variables, control structures, built-in functions, user-defined functions, expressions first-class strings, high-level data structures (lists and dictionaries), terminal and file I/O, regex pattern matching, exceptions, as well as an integrated debugger. Vim’s runtime features are written in VimL.

VimL is often known as Vimscript or Vim script.

1. Learn Vimscript the Hard Way by Steve Losh

Learn Vimscript the Hard Way is an informative book for users of the Vim text editor who want to learn how to customize it.

It is not a guide to using Vim. Before reading this book you should be comfortable editing text in Vim and know basic Vim terminology like “buffer”, “window”, “normal mode”, “insert mode” and “text object”. To use this book you should have the latest version of Vim installed, which is version 7.3 at the time of this writing. New versions of Vim are almost always backwards-compatible, so everything in this book should work fine with anything after 7.3 too.

Sections cover:

• Basic Vim commands that you can use in your ~/.vimrc file to customize Vim quickly and easily.
• Looks more deeply at Vimscript as a programming language, exploring variables, conditionals, comparisons, looping, functions, strings, string functions and more.
• Create a full plugin for a programming language from scratch – the Potion programming language, a very small language.

The HTML version of the book can be distributed on the condition that no changes are made and no charge levied.

Read the book

2. Google Vimscript Style Guide by Nate Soares, Joshua Hoak, David Barnett

Every major open-source project has its own style guide: a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) about how to write code for that project. It’s much easier to understand a large codebase when all the code in it is in a consistent style.

Google’s guide covers strings, matching strings, regular expressions, dangerous commands, fragile commands, and catching exceptions. It offers general guidelines covering messaging, type checking, Python, other languages, boilerplate, plugin layout, functions, commands, autocommands, mappings, and settings.

The style guide is licensed under the CC-By 3.0 License, which encourages you to share the document.

Read the book

3. Google Vimscript Guide by Nate Soares, Joshua Hoak, David Barnett

This is the in-depth vimscript guide. If you’re just a casual user looking to write a plugin, the abbreviated style guide is for you.

This rather rotund guide dives into justifications and clarifications. It provides an idealized set of rules that are rather too draconian to push on casual scripters.

It’s for users who want to know why certain decisions were made in the abbreviated guide and who want to learn a thing or two about using vimscript safely.

Read the book

All books in this series: