See also ViNotes

vim(1) -- potentially the most powerful editor unix users have access to, and one of the best things about it is in actual fact it's not restricted to unix users at all. Anybody can use vim, anywhere (more or less). Its only real drawback is that it's a little difficult to get to grips with at first. This page is not designed to cover basic editing. Rather, this page is a list of tips which will make your vim editing experience more enjoyable, particularly if vim is used as a programming editor.

Syntax Highlighting

vim, of course, supports syntax highlighting. Often this isn't on by default. The easiest way to turn this on is to type ":syntax on". Viola. What's that? You're using a dark background and the highlighting looks terrible? No real problem. Try ":set background=dark". Adjust as appropriate for 'it looks horrible and I have a white background'. If you just think it looks horrible fullstop, you can get a new syntax highlighting file for it... download one from vim.org, throw it into your /.vim/colors directory (you may have to create this) and explore the colorscheme command (hint, ":help colorscheme" or just ":colorscheme x", where your scheme file is x.vim). I recommend borland.vim, the colorscheme for the borland "Turbo" IDEs.

Compiling

To build from within vim, simply use ":make". It's probably a good idea to set your current working directory to the same place as your makefile is located, which you can do with ":chdir <directory>". Vim will build your project, and hopefully jump intelligently to the right place whenever you encounter errors. If you need to set environment variables for your build, it's probably a good idea to set them on your :make line, eg ":make x=n"

Buffer Movement

Vim will support multiple buffers. You can switch between them using the menu in gvim, or if you prefer to use commands you can use the following

:bn # next buffer :bp # previous buffer

You can delete a buffer with

:bd

or

:bd n # where n is the number of a buffer :bd % # current buffer :bd # # previous buffer

I map these to keys to make them useful. My .vimrc has the following

set autowrite nmap <tab> :bn<cr> nmap <s-tab> :bp<cr> nmap <c-f4> :bn<CR>:bd #<CR>

Set autowrite tells vim to save the file when you change buffers. Vim wants to do this, its a bit annoying. The above maps will map tab and shift tab to next and previous buffer, and ctrl-f4 to delete current buffer. ctrl-f4 will delete the current buffer in a way that will preserve any splits you have open, ie it'll move to the next buffer, then delete the previous one.

--DanielLawson

There is a good vim reference guide here