Backstory
OK, so today you sat down on your desk and ambitioned that today, you have to learn Vim, often known as the ubiquitous editor. You started searching for tutorials, and you find tutorials 1-hour long, 2-hours long and even 4-hours long... just for a text editor. Then, someone around suggested that you should have a primer on the subject by the vimtutor
, a simple text file that teaches you the basics of Vim. It is bundled with Vim and can be run by executing vimtutor
in the terminal. You, following suit, did exactly that, but you get something like this:
shrihan@shrihan-pc:~ $ vimtutor
-bash: vimtutor: command not found
shrihan@shrihan-pc:~ $ # wait what?!
or maybe this:
PS C:\Users\Shrihan> vimtutor
vimtutor : The term 'vimtut
tor' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the
name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:1
+ vimtutor
+ ~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (vimtuttor:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
PS C:\Users\Shrihan> # seriously?
Whatever the error maybe, you obviously know that something's wrong.
Solution
This happens because vimtutor
is not installed in the system. It should be installed with vim
, but for some reason, if it didn't, let's fix it 😉
First of all, download the following text file from the below link and save the file as .vimtutor
in your user home directory (~/
on Unix-like, C:\Users\[YourUserName]
on Windows; replace [YourUserName] with the appropriate one!):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1histC_BIPtIWpum-wqWGct5qgHLPW9UL/view?usp=sharing
Next, copy the following code as needed, and paste it in a new file called vimtutor
for Unix-like(Mac/Linux) and vimtutor.cmd
for Windows.
(a) Windows(vimtutor.cmd
)
@ECHO OFF
COPY /Y %USERPROFILE%\.vimtutor %TEMP%\vimtutor.tmp
vim %TEMP%\vimtutor.tmp
del %TEMP%\vimtutor.tmp
(b) Unix-like(vimtutor
)
#!/usr/bin/env sh
cp ~/.vimtutor $TMPDIR/vimtutor.tmp
vim $TMPDIR/vimtutor.tmp
rm $TMPDIR/vimtutor.tmp
Note that the above will only work if you have Vim installed and you have access to the vim
command without any errors.
Save the file in a location in your $PATH. On Windows, you can safely(!) copy the file to the C:\Windows directory, for others you can copy it to the /usr/bin folder. I don't know how paths work in MacOS, please Google that if needed, sorry ðŸ˜
There's one last step for Unix-like systems. There, you have to go to the location where you've saved the vimtutor
script, open a terminal there and run the following command(again, make sure you're in the location of the file):
shrihan@shrihan-pc:/usr/bin $ chmod +x vimtutor
Finally, the moment of truth, run the vimtutor
command in the terminal, after some nanoseconds(maybe) the vim should launch with the vim tutor! Happy hacking with Vim 😉
Thank you and have a wonderful day! P.S. Stay safe in these bad times, you know :)
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