preface.markdown @ 0baa9f045283

Preface
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Programmers shape ideas into text.

That text gets turned into numbers and those numbers bump into other numbers
and *make things happen*.

As programmers, we use text editors to get our ideas out of our heads and create
the chunks of text we call "programs".  Full-time programmers will spend tens of
thousands of hours of their lives interacting with their text editor, during
which they'll be doing many things:

* Getting raw text from their brains into their computers.
* Correcting mistakes in that text.
* Restructuring the text to formulate a problem in a different way.
* Documenting how and why something was done a particular way.
* Communicating with other programmers about all of these things.

Vim is incredibly powerful out of the box, but it doesn't truly shine until you
take some time to customize it for your particular work, habits, and fingers.
This book will introduce you to Vimscript, the main programming language used to
customize Vim.  You'll be able to mold Vim into an editor suited to your own
personal text editing needs and make the rest of your time in Vim more
efficient.

Along the way I'll also mention things that aren't strictly about Vimscript, but
are more about learning and being more efficient in general.  Vimscript isn't
going to help you much if you wind up fiddling with your editor all day instead
of working, so it's important to strike a balance.

The style of this book is a bit different from most other books about
programming languages.  Instead of simply presenting you with facts about how
Vimscript works, it guides you through typing in commands to see what they do.

Sometimes the book will lead you into dead ends before explaining the "right
way" to solve a problem.  Most other books don't do this, or only mention the
sticky issues *after* showing you the solution.  This isn't how things typically
happen in the real world, though.  Often you'll be writing a quick piece of
Vimscript and run into a quirk of the language that you'll need to figure out.
By stepping through this process in the book instead of glossing over it I hope
to get you used to dealing with Vimscript's peculiarities so you're ready when
you find edge cases of your own.  Practice makes perfect.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a single topic.  They're short but packed
with information, so don't just skim them.  If you really want to get the most
out of this book you need to actually type in all of the commands.  You may
already be an experienced programmer who's used to reading code and
understanding it straight away.  If so: it doesn't matter.  Learning Vim and
Vimscript is a different experience from learning a normal programming language.

You need to **type in *all* the commands.**

You need to **do *all* the exercises.**

There are two reasons this is so important.  First, Vimscript is old and has
a lot of dusty corners and twisty hallways.  One configuration option can change
how the entire language works.  By typing *every* command in *every* lesson and
doing *every* exercise you'll discover problems with your Vim build or
configuration on the simpler commands, where they'll be easier to diagnose and
fix.

Second, Vimscript *is* Vim.  To save a file in Vim, you type `:write` (or `:w`
for short) and press return.  To save a file in a Vimscript, you use `write`.
Many of the Vimscript commands you'll learn can be used in your day-to-day
editing as well, but they're only helpful if they're in your muscle memory,
which simply doesn't happen from just reading.

I hope you'll find this book useful.  It's *not* meant to be a comprehensive
guide to Vimscript.  It's meant to get you comfortable enough with the language
to mold Vim to your taste, write some simple plugins for other users, read other
people's code (with regular side-trips to `:help`), and recognize some of the
common pitfalls.

Good luck!