On Monday, March 5, 2012 4:42:16 PM UTC-5, Ben Fritz wrote: > On Mar 5, 10:18 am, Govind <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been a longtime user of Textpad on windows and transitioning more to > > Linux. Gedit by itself doesn't have some features I want like > > a) Columnar mode selection > > b) ability to sort lines > > c) Word Wrap (at least nothing that jumped out) > > > > I was told that GVIM is pretty good in terms of being able to do stuff, so > > I want to get started using it. What are my next steps (I've installed it, > > of course). > > > > Your first step should probably be to run the tutorial to get basic > movement and editing down. > > Then you should probably start browsing the help, a little at a time. > You can access Vim's help by typing :help and then pressing the Enter > key. There are a lot of commands in Vim, which is the source of its > power. Think of Vim as a video game, where your entire keyboard is > made up of movements and attacks, which can be chained together for > devastating combos! > > Besides browsing the help, you should pay attention to tasks you are > doing which are making you inefficient. Vim probably has a way to make > the task more efficient, even if you need to resort to defining a > mapping or custom command. If you often spend a lot of time > highlighting just the text within an XML tag, for example, :help text- > objects will teach you that three keystrokes will select it for you: > vit. Or even better, if you intend to change that text, cit. Note how > I used :help with a topic to jump right to the relevant section. > > More on how to use help or getting started with Vim is available here: > > http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Getting_started > http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Learn_to_use_help > > For answers to the specific features that interest you: > a) column selection is accomplished by pressing CTRL-V and then > selecting text with normal movement commands > b) sorting lines is accomplished with :%sort (for the entire file) or > something like :10,20sort to sort just lines 10-20 > c) word wrap can either mean "hard" wrap by inserting a newline, or > "soft" wrap which does not change the text but displays the line > wrapped. The former is accomplished with a variety of options (:help > 'textwidth' and :help 'formatoptions') and a command (:help gq). The > latter with the options 'wrap' and 'linebreak'.
Wow! So many replies and all helpful. As recommended I will start with the tutorial and take it from there. I will look into Cream as well- I'm using Ubuntu, so it is available in the software centre. I don't do much programming, some Python for which I've found IDLE sufficient and a little PHP which is the main programming use to which I have put Textpad. Btw, I've been using the ISPF editor for many years now, and that's no picnic either for people coming from a WYSIWYG environment! I've yet to find its handy feature of being able to hide lines (Xing them out) in any PC text editor. Thank you everybody -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
