Hello World in Vim

Every programmer starts a new language by writing hello world, and as you’ll see, Vim is a small DSL for text editing. So, here goes.

On the command line, tell Vim you want to create a new text document called hello_world.txt. Note, there are some great grapical Vim clients if you’re not a fan of working on the command line.

	$ vim hello_world.txt

Once you’re in vim, tell it you want to insert some text into this file

i

Now, insert some text.

hello world

Tell Vim you’re done inserting.

<ESC>

Tell vim you want to write the file out to disk and then quit.

:write
:quit

Congratulations, you’ve just written “hello world” in Vim. The “write and quit” command will work in any Vim, even when you’re ssh’d into a remote server.

Things are even easier on the grapical Vim clients though. Instead of :wq you could have just hit your standard save and quit key combos. On macOS that would be ⌘+s and ⌘+q. You don’t even have to exit Insert mode to save with Command+s.

Abbreviated Commands

Vim’s got a lot of wordy commands, like :write and :quit, but almost all of them have shorter variants. The alternatives for :write and :quit are :w and :q Because this is such a common thing to do Vim’s got a combo command for doing both. :wq

Tip

Sooner or later you’ll find a post online with a strange combination of letters that you aren’t familiar with like :nohl. People like to use the really short, and obscure variants, even in their config files. I encourage you to look them up in Vim’s help docs where you can see the expanded forms and learn what they do.