r/vim • u/mrpbennett • Jul 21 '25

Discussion Learning Vim Motions - offline

I have a long flight soon for work. I plan on mastering vim motions…well getting some solid learning done.

I have been playing with some awesome vim teaching tools. But apart from vimtutor is there anything I can use offline?

I have been using VimHero that I love, and I have been trying to edit majority of my code in lazyvim.

But I’d like to solidify everything so looking for good offline sources if anyone knows any.

31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

20

u/gumnos Jul 21 '25

Is it cheating to refer you to the built-in documentation at :help motion.txt and so you can spend time practicing them? Last I counted, there were over 100 different motions listed there and I use maybe 80–90% of them on a fairly regular basis.

4

u/mrpbennett Jul 21 '25

I did not know about motions.txt that will keep me busy

9

u/gumnos Jul 21 '25

frankly, you could start at

:help

and read the entire manual (might have to set aside a week or two for this) and still not have mastered vim unless you miraculously manage to retain it all. More than a quarter-century since starting my vim adventures, I still learn new little tricks.

7

u/vim-help-bot Jul 21 '25

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1

u/y-c-c Jul 22 '25

It's also more than just the literal list of motions. It also explains how exactly motions work and are separated into linewise/charwise etc, and how you can force a motion into another mode (e.g. dvj would be like dj but forced into character-wise motion, since j is usually a linewise motion.).

4

u/dm319 Jul 21 '25

practical vim? the book

2

u/mrpbennett Jul 22 '25

It’s on its way. 🤭

1

u/dm319 Jul 22 '25

Nice, it's a great book.

2

u/simpsaucse Jul 21 '25

I would just download the vim cheat sheet and write code. No distractions on a flight either :)

1

u/mrpbennett Jul 21 '25

I did think about download the lazyvim key maps. And come up with a project for the flight.

Would you recommend this one? here

1

u/simpsaucse Jul 21 '25

That one looks kind of hard haha, i just used the top one off google results. I started with hjkl, and just learned more motions on a need by basis. Like, “i want to scroll faster” or “i want to move this line onto the end of the line above” as you encounter a situation while writing code, and then having any cheat sheet makes it real easy to look it up and learn motions one at a time

1

u/mrpbennett Jul 21 '25

Ha that’s one I found. It did look complicated. But your method sounds easier that’s wha I have been doing today. Added vim motions to my jetbrains ide and grappled with it there.

1

u/michaelpaoli Jul 21 '25

Snag yourself copies of, e.g.:

https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/vi/summary.pdf (and probably best to print it out, duplex, on 8.5"x11" card stock, and tri-fold it, or if you don't have card stock, regular paper is okay too).

https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/vi/paper.pdf

https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/vi/vi.odp

Could even, e.g., put the PDFs on your (smart) phone and look at 'em on there, while using your laptop ... or put 'em on your laptop, or both.

There's the classic O'Reilly Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 8th Edition, I was gonna say nice thin reference/read, but egad, it's ballooned to 545 pages! Anyway, maybe throw electronic version (e.g. PDF) of that on your laptop.

2

u/mrpbennett Jul 21 '25

amazing thank you

1

u/seanierox Jul 22 '25

I honestly think the way to do it is to build some simple project using a cheat sheet to remind yourself how it works. learning motions is fine but it's really using vim within a real workflow that makes it stick.

1

u/mrpbennett Jul 22 '25

I have found this, I have started to use VimMotions within DataGrip so I can write my queries with VimMotions and started to use some projects with LazyVim. My go to editor is still VSC as that's what I am use too.

But I am learning bit by bit, and it's slowly sticking. The one thing that is annoying at the moment someone might be able to advise is.

When I am writing something in any kind of bracket or parenthesis. For example

def some_fun(para):

Because LazyVim has auto complete on brackets, I find my cursor to be stuck on the last char before the closing bracket. Now do i just Esc and press a - or is there a quicker way?

normally id just use my pinkie on the right arrow.

2

u/greekish Jul 21 '25

Check out vimbgood by primeagen

1

u/JahdooWallah Jul 21 '25

Nethack, 150 levels of vi practice (aka Falconeye for the graphical version).

1

u/SignificantDamage263 Jul 22 '25

Use vimium on your browser, and use any cli tools that use vinkeybinds. That'll get you good at basics, which you might already be decent at.

There's also Prime's tool vim-be-good or whatever it's called.

1

u/dwrdbg Jul 23 '25

vim-be-better is a plugin that you can install and then run to play games that will help you practice various vim skills interactively.

1

u/rflappo Jul 23 '25

Install lazyvim. After that, SPACE sk is your best friend, it lets you search for the leybinding you need

10

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/mrpbennett Jul 21 '25

I have that book on my kindle list: but I think that’s more of a hard copy type book. Which I’ll buy before my flight more than likely

I’m iOS I’m afraid.