Vim is one of the best text editors - according to a Google search.

Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer are word processors not text editors.

In this video tutorial series, we are going to look at Vim and see why people like Vim so much.

I am using Linux Mint (MATE) for this tutorial series and Vim is started from a terminal.

We open a file using vim and find out that Vim is a modal editor, The default is "normal mode" and::
J makes the cursor go down
k makes the cursor go up
l makes the cursor go to the right
h makes the cursor go to the left
x deletes the character under the cursor
i puts us in insert mode

In insert mode the j,k,l,m,h,x, and i all insert the letter as expected.

To get back into "normal mode" press the escape key.

To quit (with no changes) press escape :q (if no changes were made you will quit)
To quit (without saving changes) press escape :q! (no changes will be saved)
To quit (Saving Changes) press escape :wq (for write and quit)

To get the most out of Vim we are going to want to work with an updated version of Vim.

What is installed by default on our Linux Mint computer says that is it Vim, but it is lacking many features that we are going to want to use in this video tutorial series.

I first show how to update to what is in the repository by using sudo apt update Vim

That is a great improvement to what we had, but looking on the Vim website we see version 8.0 is the latest stable version. Many improvements and bug fixes have been made and the web-site highly recommends that we use version 8.0.

Because Linux Mint is an Ubuntu based version of Linux, I upgrade to Vim 8.0 using a ppa.