What is vim-galore?

mhinz/vim-galore — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-24

★ 17,839Vim scriptAudience · developerComplexity · 1/5LicenseSetup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((vim-galore))
    What it does
      Comprehensive Vim guide
      Structured learning
      Single reference document
    Topics covered
      Basics and motions
      Registers and macros
      Plugin management
      Debugging Vim
    Use cases
      Learn Vim from scratch
      Look up advanced features
      Understand modal editing
    Audience
      Vim beginners
      Experienced Vim users
    Translations
      Chinese
      Japanese
      Portuguese

mindmap root((vim-galore)) What it does Comprehensive Vim guide Structured learning Single reference document Topics covered Basics and motions Registers and macros Plugin management Debugging Vim Use cases Learn Vim from scratch Look up advanced features Understand modal editing Audience Vim beginners Experienced Vim users Translations Chinese Japanese Portuguese

Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Learn Vim from scratch with structured chapters that build from beginner concepts up to advanced techniques.

USE CASE 2

Look up how a specific Vim feature works, such as macros, registers, the quickfix list, or the undo tree.

USE CASE 3

Understand the difference between Vim's buffers, windows, and tabs without relying on scattered blog posts.

What is it built with?

Vim scriptMarkdown

How does it compare?

	mhinz/vim-galore	altercation/solarized	vim-syntastic/syntastic
Stars	17,839	15,982	11,223
Language	Vim script	Vim script	Vim script
Setup difficulty	easy	easy	moderate
Complexity	1/5	1/5	3/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Free to share and adapt with attribution, including commercially, as long as you use the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

So what is it?

vim-galore is a long-form guide to the Vim text editor, written as a single curated document with chapters that take you from "what even is Vim" through to corners more experienced users only stumble into. It is not software you install, the repository is essentially the source of a community-maintained tutorial and reference, made of plain Markdown with a large table of contents that points at sections on every part of the editor. The guide opens with an Intro explaining what Vim is, its modal editing philosophy, and how to get started, including a minimal vimrc and how to tell which build of Vim you are running. From there it walks through the Basics, buffers, windows, tabs, the argument list, mappings and the mapleader, registers, ranges, marks, completion, motions, operators, and text objects, autocmds, the changelist and jumplist, the undo tree, the quickfix and location lists, macros, colorschemes, folding, and sessions. Later sections cover usage like getting help offline and online, clipboard integration, temporary files, editing remote files, managing plugins, and running external programs as filters. There are chapters of focused tips, a tour of commands like :global, :normal, :execute, and :redir, a section on debugging and profiling Vim itself, and a list of common problems with answers. You would reach for vim-galore when you want a single, structured resource to actually understand Vim, rather than memorising shortcuts in isolation, or to look up an idea you have heard about but never used. The README notes the project is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and has translations into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Vietnamese.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Using vim-galore as a reference, explain how Vim's undo tree works and walk me through the commands to navigate branching undo history.

Prompt 2

Based on vim-galore's registers section, create a cheat sheet of the most useful Vim registers and a real use case for each.

Prompt 3

Explain how Vim's quickfix list differs from the location list, and give me practical ex-command workflows for each.

Prompt 4

Write a minimal .vimrc based on vim-galore's recommendations that a first-time Vim user can drop in and use immediately.

Prompt 5

Explain Vim's macro recording workflow from vim-galore and give me three concrete editing tasks where macros save significant time.

Frequently asked questions