How to open Vimtutor in Neovim and Vim text editors?

Learn the command to open Vimtutor on your existing NeoVim installed in Ubuntu, Windows, Linux Mint, MacOS, RHEL, and others.

What is Vimtutor?

Vimtutor is a vim-based tutorial program to teach users how to use a powerful VIM text editor on Linux and other platforms. VIM stands for Vi Improved and already has been used by hundreds of developers and programmers worldwide. However, as compared to other editors VIM is a little tricky for beginners. Hence, to overcome its learning curves and to know the commands to control it, a tutorial program is designed called Vimtutor. It comes by default with the text editor.

It is a quite valuable resource for beginners as well as advanced users because of its interactive and hands-on approach to learning Vim. It provides the user understanding of the keybindings of vim, its editing operations, and basic commands and also covers advanced features, such as macros, folds, and syntax highlighting.

Install VIM or NeoVIM

To use Vimtutor your system must be installed with VIM or text editors based on it such as Neovim. After that, you can start it with a single command i.e vimtutor. However, first as per your Linux-based package manager go for the command given below.

For Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, and Linux using APT run:

sudo apt install neovim

or

sudo apt install vim

For RedHat, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky, Oracle, and other RPM-based Linux including Fedore:

To get only VIM

sudo yum install vim-enhanced

Whereas users who are interested in the advanced version that is NeoVIm, can use the EPEL repo and then the installation command:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install -y neovim python3-neovi

2 ways to Open Vimtutor

Open VIMTUTOR in Linux Terminal

There are two ways to access and open Vimtutor if you are using Neovim or Nvim, text editor. One is the regular command that will work for even traditional VIM users as well i.e

Simply type the given command and this will open the VIM tutorial program directly in your Linux Terminal.

vimtutor

Use Ctrl+Z to exit. You can also read our article on who should go for Neovim and Visual Studio Code (VSCode).

Whereas, those who are using NeoVIM, can also directly open Vimtutor inside the text editor itself using

nvim +Tutor
Open Vimtutor in NeoiVIM text editor

The guide will cover all the commands and how to use keyboard shortcuts to work with the VIm text editor. The tutorial will be divided into several lessons to teach:

  • Text editing
  • How to move the cursor
  • Save the file and Exit VIM
  • Deletion commands
  • On Operations and MOtion
  • Operating on Lines
  • The Undo, Put, Repalce,  command
  • Search command.
  • And more along with a summary of each command.

Don’t forget, Vimtutor is a general guide that explains how to use all major commands in VIM whereas the manual which we get using --help gives us a quick list of options or arguments we can use with its command line.

However, those who are already familiar with VIM can go for Cheatsheet to refresh their memory. Also, take a look at our tutorial which teaches how to Delete all lines in the VI / VIM text editor at once

How long is the Vim tutorial?

Well, the Vim tutorial is quite long and one may take 60 minutes to get familiar with essential basic commands and start using the Text editor for writing code and editing files.

How to use vim in Windows cmd?

Windows 10 and 11 by default come with Winget package manager to install VIM. Here is the command to use:

winget install vim.vim 

After that to run VIM in Command prompt type vim and press the Enter key.

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