vimtutor

vimtutor [-g] [-c chapter] [language]

vimtutor teaches vim basics through hands-on lessons. It creates a copy of the tutorial file and opens it in vim for practice.The tutorial covers essential operations in approximately 30 minutes. Each lesson introduces commands with immediate practice exercises.Topics include navigation, editing, deletion, undo, copy/paste, search, and file operations. These form the foundation for productive vim use.The working copy ensures mistakes don't affect the original. Users can restart with a fresh copy anytime.Available languages include English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and many others. The tutorial adapts to system locale.Completing vimtutor provides enough knowledge for basic editing. Advanced features require additional learning.

LANGUAGE

ISO-639 language code (e.g. en, de, fr, ja).

Select the tutorial language explicitly. Glued form -lcode / --languagecode also accepted.

Load chapter N (1 or 2). Chapter 2 is only shipped in en and fr.

Start the GUI version of Vim (gvim) instead of the terminal binary.

List available language codes and exit.

Display help.

Lesson 1

Cursor movement, deletion, insertion, ESC.

Deletion, operators and motions, undo.

Put, replace, change operator.

Location, search, matching, substitute.

External commands, file operations.

Open, append, replace, copy, set options.

Help, vimrc, completion.

Only covers basics. Full vim proficiency requires significant practice. Some lessons assume US keyboard layout.

vimtutor has been included with vim since early versions, created by Bram Moolenaar (vim's author). It's based on the original vi tutorial by Michael C. Pierce and Robert K. Ware.

vim(1), vi(1), nvim(1), vimdiff(1)