Text-wrangling with Vim

Text-wrangling with Vim

Feminist Linux Meetup Vienna, 4^th February 2026

jackie / Andrea Ida Malkah Klaura <jackie@tantemalkah.at>

https://tantemalkah.at/2026/vim

All contents, unless otherwise noted, were produced by Andrea Ida Malkah Klaura
under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 4.0 International License.
The feminist technoscience logo on the waiting queue slide is an adaptation of a public domain image.

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content

• Text editor demos
• Short history & intro to vim
• workshopping:
  • Vim Adventures
  • VIM Tutor
  • VimGolf

What are we talking about?

Text editor demos

• gedit
• nano
• vim

The origins of Vim

• Two-Bit History: Where Vim Came From
• Computer Things: Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance
• Initial release: January 1992, by Bram Moolenar
• VIM for Vi IMproved originally: Vi IMitation
• Vi initial release: 1976, by Bill Joy

The origins of Vi

• ed : line editor (developed for teleprinters), 1973, Ken Thompson, AT&T Bell Labs
  • one of first 3 key elements of Unix"
  • cryptic ed commands only suitable for "immortals" (George Coulouris)
• em : "editor for mortals", based on ed code, 1976, George Coulouris
• en : Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, inspired by em
• ex : en extended, with added full-screen visual mode, Bill Joy 1976

h, j, k, l ...

for moving around, seriously?

what about arrow keys?

Source: Wikpedia [en]: vi (text editor), image by StuartBrady, CC-BY-SA

or check out this photo of a LSI-ADM3A keyboard

Who actually uses Vim nowadays?!?

• "In 2018, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers."
• "In 2015, the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor"
• "and, in 2019, the fifth most popular development environment."
• all according to Wikipedia [en]: Vim (text editor)

The heck WHY?!?

how to transform

to

in 56 keystrokes?!? ^{(Images: screenshots of a VimGolf challenge)}

What about these modes?

Source: Wikipeda [en]: Vim (texteditor), image by harp, CC-BY-SA

• 14 modes (7 basic + 7 variants)
• most important, for starters:
  • normal mode: the default mode accepting editor commands
  • insert mode: editing content

VIM Adventures

vim-adventures.com

VIM Tutor

Open up a terminal and type

vimtutor

VimGolf

vimgolf.com

• e.g. YAML to dotenv
• or Swap columns and transform to CSV format
• or Reorganize Pokémon
• ...