Learn Vimscript the Hard Way, by Steve Losh, is free to read online. It is a book for users of the Vim editor who want to learn how to customize Vim.
Book Description
It is not a guide to using Vim. Before reading this book you should be comfortable editing text in Vim and know what terms like “buffer”, “window” and “insert mode” mean.
Vim is incredibly powerful out of the box, but it doesn’t truly shine until you take some time to customize it for your particular work, habits, and fingers. This book will introduce you to Vimscript, the main programming language used to customize Vim. You’ll be able to mold Vim into an editor suited to your own personal text editing needs and make the rest of your time in Vim more efficient.
Table of Contents
- Echoing Messages
- Setting Options
- Basic Mapping
- Modal Mapping
- Strict Mapping
- Leaders
- Editing Your Vimrc
- Abbreviations
- More Mappings
- Training Your Fingers
- Buffer-Local Options and Mappings
- Autocommands
- Buffer-Local Abbreviations
- Autocommand Groups
- Operator-Pending Mappings
- More Operator-Pending Mappings
- Status Lines
- Responsible Coding
- Variables
- Variable Scoping
- Conditionals
- Comparisons
- Functions
- Function Arguments
- Numbers
- Strings
- String Functions
- Execute
- Normal
- Execute Normal!
- Basic Regular Expressions
- Case Study: Grep Operator, Part One
- Case Study: Grep Operator, Part Two
- Case Study: Grep Operator, Part Three
- Lists
- Looping
- Dictionaries
- Toggling
- Functional Programming
- Paths
- Creating a Full Plugin
- Plugin Layout in the Dark Ages
- A New Hope: Plugin Layout with Pathogen
- Detecting Filetypes
- Basic Syntax Highlighting
- Advanced Syntax Highlighting
- Even More Advanced Syntax Highlighting
- Basic Folding
- Advanced Folding
- Section Movement Theory
- Potion Section Movement
- External Commands
- Autoloading