Are you intrigued by all those fancy Vim tricks? Are you considering a switch, but are overwhelmed by the steep learning curve? If so, why don't you come along with me, and I'll show you everything I know about this incredible editor.

Let's begin by reviewing the absolute basics. With Vim, how do we save a file, or quit the editor, or edit a new file? How do we set configuration values?

Let's get back into it. In this lesson, we'll review addition configuration, custom mappings, and auto commands. Don't forget: you won't learn this properly, unless you work along!

View the.vimrc for this episode.

Before we dig into the intricacies of Vim, let's take a moment to focus on visuals. Can we at least set up a better color scheme and font? Sure, we can. And what about those ugly scrollbars in MacVim?

A neat feature of Vim is its ability to create any arrangement of split windows. In this episode, you'll learn how this works, and will then move on to configuring their default keybindings, accordingly.

View our .vimrc file, as of this episode's completion.

You'll frequently need to browse your project's file structure, so it's important that we build a good workflow. In this lesson, we'll first learn how to improve Vim's default netrw file browser with Tim Pope's excellent Vinegar.vim. Next, for a more traditional experience, we'll pull in NERDTree. As you'll find, when we use Vundle for dependency management, downloading and installing any plugin is a cinch!

We'll next pull in the popular CtrlP plugin, which allows you to rapidly switch from file to file.

Here's our .vimrc file so far.

Before we move ahead to working with c-tags, let's first make a handful of configuration tweaks. First, we'll fix a conflict between NERDTree and netrw. Next, we'll enable fancy symbols for our Fira Code font. And finally, we'll finish up by improving MacVim's awkward tabs, and switching our Ctrl + P keyboard shortcut over to the more familiar Command + P.

Imagine that you need to find a particular method in your project. The traditional way is to hunt around the project tree in your sidebar, find the file, click on it, and scroll the page until you find the method. Ehh, we can do way better than that. In this lesson, you'll learn how to instantly browse to any symbol in your project. It's lightning fast!

View our .vimrc file so far.

We have a theme we like, but what if we need to tweak a few visuals? Let me show you the basic process in this lesson.

An immediate pitfall for new Vim users is how to perform site-wide searches and replacements. In this lesson, I'll demonstrate my exact approach - using Ag.vim and Greplace.vim.

Let's switch back to how we browse files. It's crucial that you find a workflow you enjoy. Another option you have is a GUI app, called PeepOpen. If you enjoy the Sublime-Text form of "Command + p", you might find that you prefer this option.

As you write code in Vim, try to keep a mental record of all the tasks that take longer than you'd like. Even an extra two seconds adds up, trust me. In this lesson, I'll show you a handful of mappings that you might consider, when working in a Laravel app.

When you need to create code snippets in Vim, SnipMate will do the job quite nicely. I'll show you how it works.

View the .vimrc file for this series so far on GitHub.

Tim Pope's excellent Surround plugin is a stable in every Vim user's tool belt. Need to quickly change single quotes to double quotes? Or do you want to instantly delete a surrounding HTML tag, or update it to a new one all together? With this plugin, it's all a cinch.

In this episode, we'll focus on three different PHP optimizations. We'll begin by updating our syntax file. Next, we'll add support for automatically adding use imports to any class. Finally, we'll add a mapping that allows us to instantly sort use statements by length.

We've yet to figure out how to handle auto-completion. As such, in this episode, we'll take a first step. The goal is to type a sequence of characters, hit "tab", and then see all relevant results from nearby buffers. As always though, throughout the video, we'll discuss a number of other helpful Vim tricks.

View our .vimrc file, as of this episode.

Let's set up php-cs-fixer, so that we may type a simple keystroke and instantly format any PHP class, according to the PSR-2 convention.

Vim marks offer you a way to instantly return to any location in your project, simply by typing a keystroke. I think you'll like it!

Unfortunately, when it comes to managing tabs, indents, and spacing, well - Vim can get pretty confusing. That's okay; learn how to configure them once, and then feel free to expel all this junk from your brain.

A macro is nothing more than a recording that can be played back at any time. An excellent candidate for a macro is any piece of workflow that you find yourself repeating over and over. As an example, in this video, we'll record a macro to take a constructor argument, and then automatically initialize and assign it, as a property.