Development

Vim in 10 Minutes

This week at my local PHP user group we were speaking about IDEs. There were four of us who prepared to speak to attendees. I wasn’t sure what kind of time I’d be allotted, so I didn’t prepare as I usually do. I figured I’d just give an off-the-cuff introduction to some of the niceties of Vim. It didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.

About a year ago I did a two-hour Vim talk. I spent a significant amount of time preparing for the talk. The presentation was well-received and, I’d like to think, resulted in a few new Vim users. Why do I mention this? It makes me feel better about the crummy introduction to Vim that I gave last night.

So I’m just throwing this out there… make sure you have more than 10 minutes if you want to introduce someone to Vim. If you have less than 10 minutes, I suggest grabbing a really messy file and cleaning it up using Vim power. This may be enough to spark some interest. Also you may find it beneficial to just point your audience to a YouTube video of a Vim power user working his/her magic. Vim Tutor is another approach.

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