Vim University - Screencasts and Articles for Serious Vim Students. Vim anti-patterns | Arabesque. The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Because Vim makes you so fast and fluent, it’s especially hard to root these out because you might not even notice them, but it’s worth it. Here I’ll list some of the more common ones. Moving one line at a time If you have to move more than a couple of lines, moving one line at a time by holding down j or k is inefficient. There are many more ways to move vertically in Vim. I find that the two most useful are moving by paragraph and by screenful, but this depends on how far and how precisely you have to move.
If you happen to know precisely where you want to go, navigating by searching is the way to go, searching forward with / and backward with ?. d2wi c2w. Vivify. Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? The VI Gang Sign by Jon Beltran de Heredia, May 16th, 2007 Yes, even if you can't believe it, there are a lot fans of the 30-years-old vi editor (or its more recent, just-15-years-old, best clone & great improvement, vim). No, they are not dinosaurs who don't want to catch up with the times - the community of vi users just keeps growing: myself, I only got started 2 years ago (after over 10 years of being a professional programmer).
Friends of mine are converting today. Heck, most vi users were not even born when vi was written! Yes, there are definite reasons why the vi/vim editing model is just superior to any other out there. Misconception #1: modal editing The first time you stumble into vi or vim, you are shocked and disgusted that you have to use 'i' to start typing text.
Turns out, this is just a completely wrong way to use vi or vim. Let me explain the philosophy behind this. And now we come to insert commands. Example #1: the wonderful dot command Let's see a concrete example. Vim: revisited. I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years. Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. I felt that the kind of programming I’m doing is not easily done without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs and installing all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that in the end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it the end it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder. Recently, I decided to give Vim another shot. This time around it was different – something in my brain switched and now for the first time in my life I’m proud of my knowledge of Vim.
My philosophy of it has changed to “less is more”, my approach was more disciplined and my motivation stronger. And so you don’t spend as much time learning as I did, I am going to lay down some fundamentals. Start with a basic setup – but not zero This is a good starting point for your .vimrc: Make it pretty Learn to move. How I boosted my Vim » nvie.com - Vimperator. 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!
Know vim - Vimperator. Vim Cheat Sheat for Programmers by Michael Pohoreski. Update: Version 2.0 is up! There are now 4 versions to chose from: (If you are wondering what the differences are between the screen and print: the screen has less color variations, and no gradients to make it easier to read.) One designed for on-screen reading: PDF (Excel 2011 source),One designed for hard-copy reading: PDF (Excel 2011 source),One designed for monochrome printing: PDF (Excel 2011 source), andOne designed for Red/Green color bindness -- a "Blue" theme PDF (Excel 2011 source).
The color coded Legend / Keys helps provide guidance for your experience level. Green = Essential Yellow = Basic Orange / Blue = Advanced Red = Expert If you don't like this version (I'd love to hear why) try these, you may find them more to your liking... Thanks to all the redditors for the feedback! The on-screen 150 DPI .png version is shown...
The color hard-copy 300 DPI .png version: The monochrome hard-copy 300 DPI .png version: An color blind hard-copy 150 DPI .png version: === Vim Rants === Best of VIM Tips, gVIM's Key Features zzapper. Tips Home Vim Tips Blog (NEW) Cygwin VimTools Buy Vim Book Support VIM Submit to Social Websites. Coming Home to Vim. I’m a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things. I don’t buy the “you’re thinking 90% of the time and only typing 10% of the time, so your editor doesn’t really matter” argument. Even if the premise is true, the conclusion is wrong. If I think for 10 minutes and then start typing, I want the typing to take the shortest time possible so I can get back to thinking.
I recently started using Vim as my primary editor. Some Background About Me In 2006 I decided it was time for a change. SubEthaEdit: As cool as SubEthaEdit was, I always felt like there was a better editor out there for me. TextMate: At the time I thought TextMate was amazing (and it really was). Learning the vi and Vim Editors: Ack. Vim is hard, I just want to click around. More than a year ago, I wrote about switching to Vim. I was quite happy with how it all worked, but I found myself switching back to Textmate after a while. I read through a lot of dotfiles to “steal” some configuration options from others, took some time to go through vimtutor, read some blogposts and after a while, I was quite happy with how it all worked. My new, full screen Janus-powered MacVim editor, with sexy drawer But after some time, I started switching back to Textmate. At first, I only opened it up to do non-code writing, but after a while, I started using Textmate for bigger projects too since it felt easier to navigate around project files.
Sometimes, I just want to click around, especially when looking for and opening files. MacVim It turns out I wasn’t the only one running into problems like this. I got a new hard drive, which was a great excuse to do a clean install and set up a better work environment. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to achieve. Janus Click, click? Writing Vim Plugins. A while ago I wrote a post about switching back to Vim. Since then I’ve written two plugins for Vim, one of which has been officially “released”. post: A couple of people have asked me if I’d write a guide to creating Vim plugins.
I don’t feel confident enough to write an official “guide”, but I do have some advice for Vim plugin authors that might be useful. Other People Who Know More Than I Do Writing two decently-sized Vim plugins has given me some experience, but there are a lot of people that know far more than I do. Tim Pope The first is Tim Pope. Tim Pope: It would be awesome to read a guide on the ins and outs of Vim scripting by him. Scrooloose It’s 2011. If ! Csv.vim - A Filetype plugin for csv files. Pager - Use ViM as PAGER. Markdown.
Download Markdown 1.0.1 (18 KB) — 17 Dec 2004 Introduction Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus. The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The best way to get a feel for Markdown’s formatting syntax is simply to look at a Markdown-formatted document. (You can use this ‘.text’ suffix trick to view the Markdown source for the content of each of the pages in this section, e.g. the Syntax and License pages.) Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. Movable Type. Extradite.vim: a git commit browser.
File Navigation in Vim @ Not A Hat. Running Vim within IRB. Running Vim within IRB If you work with ruby you will know that the interactive ruby shell, or ‘IRB’ for short, is a useful sketchpad for coding. But the command line interface of IRB can feel quite limiting in comparison with the power of your text editor. In this episode, I’m going to demonstrate how you can get the best of both worlds, by loading Vim from inside IRB. IRB is great for trying out one liners, but if you need to sketch longer blocks of ruby, it soon falls down. In his Utility Belt gem, Giles Bowkett has collected a grab-bag of tricks and techniques for IRB, the highlight of which is the ability to interactively edit code in your text editor. Installation Install the interactive editor gem by running this at the command line: gem install interactive_editor Create an ~/.irbrc file if you don’t already have one, then paste the following into it: Note that the utility belt gem also includes an interactive editor, but it is currently out of date.
Vim Regular Expressions 101.