Hey,
I attended Damien Conway's 'Mastering Vim' tutorial at OSCON. It was pretty
cool, although you really have to force yourself to use some of the tips and
tricks on a regular basis to get them into memory.
Among the more useful tips [copied from his extensive notes] were -
Preview your search results
===========================
Vim has an option that causes it to show you where you search will match:
:set incsearch
Looks ahead as you type the search pattern, and highlights the first match.
Only jumps to that position when you hit <enter>. If you're looking ahead and
hit <esc> instead, it cancels the search and returns to the former position.
Very handy for 'peak-and-return'.
Matching delimeters
===================
To move the matching bracket of a {}, (), or [] pair, use %
By default, vim only matches the above, but you can extend that to whatever
pairs you like
set matchpairs+=<:>
Even to 'pairs' that aren't normally considered pairs
set matchpairs+==:;
[Very useful when programming to see what variables assign to]
Keep track of where you were
============================
In normal mode, you can leave a mark at any cursor position. Just type m<char>.
For example,
mh
Then to go back to that mark, you type a backtick: `<same char>
That is
`h
Or, to go to the start of the line containing the mark, type a single quote
'<same char>
'h
If you use a lowercase letter, the mark is per-buffer. If you use an uppercase
letter, the mark is global. You can see all marks you've set by typing
:marks
Copying delimited objects
=========================
To copy the entire {} block the cursor is in: yab or ya{
To copy the entire [] delimited text the cursor is in: ya[
To copy the entire () delimited text the cursor is in: ya(
Indented pasting
================
To paste lines above or below the current line, but with the same level of
indenting
]P
]p
There's lots of other neat tricks like branching, defining tabs or page widths,
abbreviations and maps - it's worth having a look at the extensive help.
:help
:help <topic><cr>
:help <string><tab>
:helpgrep <pattern>
Within the help, there are a bunch of links, within bars, that you can jump to
using <ctrl>]
My personal ~/.vimrc file contains -
set textwidth=80
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab
set shiftround
which wraps everything to 80 characters, has tab stops at 4 characters, replaces
any tabs with spaces, and rounds down any tab spacing. Works for me at least ;)
Glynn
Ben Ford wrote:
> I've been having a play with vim too... mostly cos I want to be able to use
> it through ssh on my server at home. Here are some links I've found:
>
> http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
> http://www.vi-improved.org/tutorial.php
> http://www.rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html
> http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=182
> http://www.geocities.com/volontir/
>
> The second one is particularly good! :)
> Ben
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daryn Hanright [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wednesday, 9 August 2006 11:59 a.m.
> To: Canterbury Linux Users Group (CLUG)
> Subject: Brushing up on vim skills
>
> Got a quiet period at work, so brushing up on my vim skills - its one of
> those incremental learning things I find! Anyway found this neat site:
> http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html
>
> Nice hints there. Gonna make more use of navigating around in command
> mode, using keys like G (bottom of page), gg (top of page), h, j, k, l and
> particular the combo of j,k
> (up, down) then w, b to go forwards/back a word.
>
> Also another one I've picked up is commenting out a
> bunch of code. From command mode, go CTRL-V, block text you want to
> comment out, go SHIFT-I, type your comment out syntax depending on what
> language you are using, then press ESC - it put that comment syntax on
> the whole block!
>
> Anyone else got some vim tips to share?
