Notes
1You and I aren’t the only ones that feel this way. Even very smart people can get caught by the “throw the newbie in the deep end” problem.↩
2A few months ago↩
3According to me, see the whole “Opinionated” thing up above.↩
8I’m going to use lowest common denominator words like “Terminal” a lot. If your OS calls it something different like a shell or a command line or (heaven help you) cmd.exe then just substitute that in your head.↩
9Later on you’ll want to know that this is the “quit and don’t save anything” way of getting out. There are a few other ways to exit vim, but we’ll get there later.↩
10Remember that commands that start with a colon : require you to press <enter> to make them execute. Okay, this is definitely the last time I’m going to repeat that. ↩
11I’ve heard it said that some people call Normal Mode “Beep Mode” because you’ll try to switch back to it and the terminal will beep at you and you’ll realize you’re already in it. I don’t know if I believe that anybody actually calls it that, but since I’m writing a vim book I’m honor bound to pass this bit of information on to you. Just like if I were writing Beginner’s Big Book o’ Computer Facts I would feel obligated to mention that four bits is called a “nibble” (because it’s half a byte and “byte” sounds like “bite”! Get it? GET IT???), even though I’m pretty sure that’s just a joke that got put in some textbook years ago and has since gotten out of hand.↩
12“There is more than one way to do it” usually pronounced “Tim-Toady”↩
13Here are two secret bonus ways to exit vim that you won’t need to know about until you know how to open multiple files: :qa closes all open files and quits vim, and :qa! does the same thing even if any file has unsaved changes. Don’t worry, we’ll review them again when we talk about opening multiple files.↩