Vim Books - Key Takeaways

in Books
#vim #neovim #vi

Dates Read: 11/24/2025 - 11/29/2025

Books Read:

  • Learning the vi and Vim Editors: Power and Agility Beyond Just Text Editing — Rating: 5/5
  • Practical Vim, Second Edition: Edit at the Speed of Thought — Rating: 5/5
  • Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim — Rating: 4/5

Rating: 5/5 (overall)

I'm doing something a little unconventional here: I wanted to review all three books in one post since they are so closely related that reviewing them separately would feel redundant.

I started my Vim journey the summer before my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO. It was during the start of COVID—like any other bored nerd, I wanted to explore Linux, and I started falling in love with any command-line tool I could install and get my hands on.

There was something refreshing about being able to stay entirely in the terminal and do everything in one place. It's minimalism at its peak.

It's surprising I came across these books only after college, because I didn't really think about them until I heard Coding Jesus talk about them.

I'm glad I stumbled upon them because now I know about simple things I had been missing, like using cw to change a word instead of holding down x to delete it manually.

I felt so inefficient prior to finding these tips. That said, it's worth taking all of it with a grain of salt—you won't use everything you see unless you're practicing daily. As with anything, it's better to pick a few things you'll actually use often rather than trying to absorb everything at once. Over time, you start to naturally think in terms of whether Vim already has a built-in way to do something.

I now even prefer using Neovim and its Lua configuration over a vimrc, simply because it has a larger community and is more actively maintained. Regardless, it's good to know both—the differences are fairly minor in practice.

What I also learned from these books is that I don't really need tmux as much as I thought, since with Neovim or Vim I can already open multiple panes and windows to edit files or even manage terminal sessions.

That said, the first two books are excellent and provide enough depth to get comfortable and efficient with Vim. The last book is a bit more redundant and mostly focuses on Neovim setup, which is fine, but it doesn't add as much conceptual value beyond configuration differences.

Overall, start with one of the first two—whichever you can get your hands on—and begin practicing Vim regularly.