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Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

By Steve Losh (241 pages)

Learn Vimscript the Hard Way is an informative book for users of the Vim text editor who want to learn how to customize it.

Sections cover:

• Basic Vim commands that you can use in your ~/.vimrc file to customize Vim quickly and easily
• Looks more deeply at Vimscript as a programming language, exploring variables, conditionals, comparisons, looping, functions, strings, string functions and more
• Create a full plugin for a programming language from scratch – the Potion programming language, a very small language

The HTML version of the book can be distributed on the condition that no changes are made and no charge levied.

Google Vimscript Style Guide

By Nate Soares, Joshua Hoak, David Barnett (HTML)

Every major open-source project has its own style guide: a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) about how to write code for that project. It’s much easier to understand a large codebase when all the code in it is in a consistent style.

Google’s guide covers strings, matching strings, regular expressions, dangerous commands, fragile commands, and catching exceptions. It offers general guidelines covering messaging, type checking, Python, other languages, boilerplate, plugin layout, functions, commands, autocommands, mappings, and settings. There is also a more in-depth vimscript guide published by Google.

Both style guides are licensed under the CC-By 3.0 License, which encourages you to share these documents.

A Byte of Vim

By Swaroop C H (78 pages)

A Byte of Vim is a book which teaches you how to master the Vim editor (version 7), even for users who know nothing other than how to use the keyboard.

The book teaches new users how to use Vim, and then moves on to exhibit advanced features including windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer’s editor, and how to extend Vim with your own plugins.

A Byte of Vim is released under a CC BY-SA license.

Vim Recipes

By Run Paint Run Run (178 pages)

Vim Recipes seeks to complement Vim’s built-in documentation. It sets out a common problem, offers a solution, and then elaborates with discussion notes.

Chapters cover:

• Basics
• Editing
• Typing
• Navigation
• GUI
• Searching
• Display
• Extending
• Other Uses of Vim

The book’s cover depicts Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim.

This book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, and its complete text is available in a Git repository. As the book is no longer hosted by the author, we locally host the PDF version. Click the above link to download.

Vi IMproved – Vim: The Tutorial

By Steve Oualline (572 pages)

This is a complete reference text to the Vim text editor. Also check out the author’s Vim Tutorial and Reference which seeks to document every significant command in Vim.

This book is published under the Open Publication License (OPL).

UNIX Text Processing

By Dale Dougherty, Tim O’Reilly (680 pages)

This book shows the reader how to effectively prepare written documents, especially in the process of producing book-length documents. The authors demonstrate popular tools available to meet this task. It also examines text processing in terms of problems and solutions: the problems faced by a writer undertaking a large writing project and the solutions offered by using the resources and power of a computer system.

Chapters cover:

• UNIX Fundamentals
• Learning vi
• nroff and troff
• The ms Macros
• The mm Macros
• Advanced Editing
• Formating with tbl
• Typesetting Equations with eqn
• Drawing Pictures
• A Miscellany of UNIX Commands
• Let the Computer Do the Dirty Work
• The awk Programming Language
• Writing nroff and troff Macros
• Figures and Special Effects
• What’s in a Macro Package?
• An Extended ms Macro Package
• Putting It All Together

While this book was published way back in 1997, it still provides a wealth of relevant information.

The book is published under the Creative Commons’ Attribution License.

VIM User Manual

By Bram Moolenaar (258 pages)

No roundup of the best free VIM books could be complete without the official VIM User Manual. It offers task oriented explanations, from simple to complex. Reads from start to end like a book. It’s available with the standard VIM distribution.