So, folks, in an effort to provide a service to the community rather than simply nattering on about my neuroses, I thought that I would provide a list vim resources that you might all find helpful on your own journeys with vim.

Just a refresher: VIM is a super old school, super powerful text editor that I'm in a battle to learn. For people who live and breath text, this is sort of the ergonomic "leather man tool" to end all such tools.

These are just documentation sources, not GUI layers and what not, which I also recommend you look into if you're going to be a serious VIM user. VIM works pretty well in a command line (its native environment) but the GUI is most helpful in letting VIM interact with your other applications, as it almost certainly will need to. Cream for VIM works great for linux, I've not tested it for windows (but I suspect that it's pretty good), and its downright sucky for Mac. MacVim is remarkably good, but needs some performance enhancing before I think it's really viable, particularly on older machines. The issue with this is that the more official gvim package is written in an outdated environment for OS X, but is generally acceptable for windows and linux, so it's fine. Anyway. onto the resource.

  • dotfiles - Dotfiles is a collection of users' unix preferences and setting files. It's really useful if you're getting into seriously using the shell (.bashrc/.bash_profile, .zshrc, etc.) or other unix-ish tools like Mutt and vim to see what most people are doing to customize the program. Most of these programs seem painfully difficult only because everyone who uses them has customized them to within an inch of their lives.
  • vim tips - A great wikia wiki (the private/for profit wiki hosting project by the people who do wikipedia.) It collects little bits of nagging "how on earth do you do x" and usually there's an answer.
  • vi editor 101 - This is the website guide that has all of the vim answers. All of them. It's not cleverly or usefully organized so you have to grep through it, but other wise it's quite useful.
  • Editing in vim - This is the cheat sheet/guide that I find myself turning to more than any other when I forget how to do something that I should know reflexively. And the page is well designed and well laid out.
  • vim for textmate fans
  • If you, like me, have experience with the amazing TextMate editor, and want some help making the vim transition this is a good place to start, and even if your not there are a couple of vim tips that I think many will enjoy.