Long-range line duplication. The brief In the video, we tackle a simple problem. With our cursor on line 16 of this file: Copy line 9 and place a duplicate below line 16, to produce this: Normal mode solutions We start with a naïve solution: kkkkkkk yy jjjjjjj p Our first refinement speeds up navigation using the goto line command (:help G), and the jumplist: 9G yy <C-o> p Ex command solutions An alternative way to goto line 9 would be :9. . :9yank p But we can still do better. . :9copy16 We can compress this down to just three characters: :9t. The :t command is simply an alias for :copy. The :copy command Here are some more examples of how the :copy command can be used: Further reading.
Edit remote files locally via SCP/RCP/FTP. I'm frequently editing files remotely, but if the network traffic is tight, then a normal Vim session turns into a tortuous event. The solution to that was right under my nose: Vim's Network-Oriented File Transfers (:help netrw). Instead of editing the file remotely, it can be transfered from the host server, to a local copy, edited and then sent back when done. I know that you can do this manually, but it's a hassle, besides, if it can be done automatically, why not go for that? You need the following installed and properly configured: Vim netrw.vim (distributed with Vim) scp, rcp, ftp or ftp+ To use, all you need is to specify the protocol, user, host and path to the file you want to edit: vim gvim Every time you write the file (:w etc) the file will get copied over to the source and you will be brought back to your session for further editing.
That's it! Go for it. How I boosted my Vim » nvie.com. A few weeks ago, I felt inspired by articles from Jeff Kreeftmeijer and Armin Ronacher. I took some time to configure and fine-tune my Vim environment. A lot of new stuff made it into my .vimrc file and my .vim directory. This blog post is a summary describing what I’ve added and how I use it in my daily work. Before doing anything else, make sure you have the following line in your .vimrc file: " This must be first, because it changes other options as side effectset nocompatible Step 0: make the customization process easier ¶ Before starting configuring, it’s useful to install pathogen. So, download pathogen.vim, move it into the .vim/autoload directory (create it if necessary) and add the following lines to your .vimrc, to activate it: " Use pathogen to easily modify the runtime path to include all" plugins under the ~/.vim/bundle directorycall pathogen#helptags()call pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles() " change the mapleader from \ to ,let mapleader="," Change Vim behaviour ¶ fun!
Vim regexes are awesome. Two years ago I wrote about how Vim's regexes were no fun compared to :perldo and :rubydo. Turns out I was wrong, it was just a matter of not being used to them. Vim's regexes are very good. They have all of the good features of Perl/Ruby regexes, plus some extra features that don't make sense outside of a text editor, but are nonetheless very helpful in Vim. Here are a few of the neat things you can do. Vim regexes are inconsistent when it comes to what needs to be backslash-escaped and what doesn't, which is the one bad thing. But Vim lets you put \v to make everything suddenly consistent: everything except letters, numbers and underscores becomes "special" unless backslash-escaped. Without \v: :%s/^\%(foo\)\{1,3}\(.\+\)bar$/\1/ With \v: :%s/\v^%(foo){1,3}(.+)bar$/\1/ Far easier to read. One thing that :perldo and :rubydo can't do is span newlines; you can't combine two lines and you can't break one line into two.
But Vim's regexes can span newlines if you use \_. instead of .. See :h /\zs.