Book review: Pro Vim

content/reviews/books/pro-vim.md

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+title = "Pro Vim - Mark McDonnell"
+date = 2019-09-04
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["en-au", "books", "reviews", "vim", "mark mcdonnell"]
++++
+
+[GoodReads link](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23717582-pro-vim): (No
+summary exists).
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+{{ stars(stars=2) }}
+
+First, the disclaimers: I'm a VIM user since early 2000; I wrote a "Using VIM"
+book-of-sorts (in Portuguese); this book is, at the time of this review, 5
+years old.
+
+The book intro said it was called "Pro" 'cause there was no middle ground for
+VIM: when you start learning VIM, you have to go all the way to pro.
+
+So, is it a book aimed for beginners? Maybe. VIM has a very steep learning
+curve, but things can be smoothed out by explaining things in steps; because
+VIM uses composable commands, you can explain movement -- say, "w" moves the
+cursor to "next Word", "e" moves the cursor to the end of the word and so on
+-- and then explain that you can modify the text using a verb and a movement
+-- "d" is delete and "dw" means "delete word". But the book decides to jump
+around and, while explaining movement, jumps into the modification verbs
+without explaining verbs before: There you are, leisurely reading about moving
+the cursor around and suddenly a "c2w" appears, with no explanation of what
+the "c" or "2" does. It works, but I have the feeling that it more confusing
+to dump things straight away than explaining step by step and how things
+connect.
+
+Is it a book aimed for people who already know VIM? Maybe not. Surely there
+are a few things one can still learn about VIM years after using it, but after
+20 years, I guess I read everything VIM can do at this point. But, again,
+maybe you don't have 20 years of VIM and there are things you still don't
+know.
+
+Does it show ways to make you more productive in VIM? I'm not sure. I mean,
+the whole book is based on the author's workflow -- a workflow that is only
+slightly exposed -- and if you don't have the same workflow... Maybe it won't
+fit at all on yours, 'cause it focus on the workflow and not on how certain
+movements/commands can improve yours.
+
+Is this book up-to-date? In the VIM commands part, yes. In the plug-ins... not
+so much. VIM got a bunch of new releases recently (say, last year) and, thus,
+a lot has changed in the plug-in area. Surely Fugitive (which the author
+decided it should be called "fugative", for some reason) is still the most
+feature-complete Git plugin, but everything else was already replaced (and
+yes, that book-of-sorts I wrote also suffers from this problem).
+
+Why Tmux is there? Well, VIM mixes well with Tmux, but I have to ask
+<i>why</i> it is there. Why there isn't a section for rxvt, for example? Or
+Gnome-Terminal? Doesn't VIM mixes well with those too? (My guess is, again,
+that the book focus a lot on the author's workflow and not how things in the
+workflow improved things, so because the author feels Tmux improved his
+workflow, we must talk about Tmux). There is also the problem that the author
+recommends using his configuration, so a lot of keybinds are not the default
+ones, and one starting from scratch may not understand why things aren't
+working.
+
+Again, the book didn't age well. Plugins are out of date, there should be a
+serious editorial work on it -- one chapter has paragraphs with garbled
+content, which is completely unintelligible -- there is no "Style Conventions"
+for things, so keystrokes will appear in one style in one chapter and in a
+different style in the next. And some things are shown in one chapter and only
+explained in the next, which makes me think the order was changed after the
+chapters were written.
+
+In general, it may be OK if you are starting with VIM, but that's that.