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A Byte of Vim

1. lr lU ed We el TN ll I v V V Esc gt WM WN md li Visual mode This drawing was created using Vim and Dr Chip s DrawlIt plugin 1 See help vim modes intro and help mode switching for details on the various modes and how to switch between them respectively If you remain unconvinced about why the concept of modes is central to Vim s power and simplicity do read the articles on Why Vi 2 and about the vi input model 3 better way of editing onwhyitisa Previous Next External links 1 http vim sourceforge net scripts script php script id 40 2 http www viemu com a why vi vim html 3 http blog ngedit com 2005 06 03 the vi input model Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Modes amp oldid 1182 Principal Authors Swaroop Karmadude Vim en Typing Skills 23 Vim en Typing Skills Introduction We just learned about how to switch between the three basic modes in Vim Isn t it hard to remember all those keys How do you remember which key is for which operation Well that s the key question The answer is that you shouldn t remember your fingers should automatically know what to do It must literally be on your finger tips So how do we do that By making it a habit Walking is not a nature that humans have at birth but after trying a bit and by habit we learn to walk Same with Vim although it r
2. There are many functions available see List manipulation and Dictionary manipulation sections in help function list Writing a Vim script We will now write a Vim script that can be loaded into Vim and then we can call its functionality whenever required This is different from writing the script inline and running immediately as we have done all along Let us tackle a simple problem how about capitalizing the first letter of each word in a selected range of lines The use case is simple When I write headings in a text document they look better if they are capitalized but I m too lazy to do it myself So I can write the text in lower case and then simply call the function to capitalize We will start with the basic template script Save the following script as the file capitalize vim Vim global plugin for capitalizing first letter of each word in the current line Last Change 2008 11 21 Fri 08 23 AM IST Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php if exists loaded capitalize finish endif let loaded capitalize 1 TODO The real functionality goes in here How It Works The first line of the file should be a comment explaining what the file is about There are 2 3 standard headers mentioned regarding the file such as Last Changed which explains how old the script is the Maintainer info so that users of the script can contact the mainta
3. Previous Next External links 1 http en wikipedia org wiki Chandrayaan 1 Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php titlexVim en Moving_ Around amp oldid 1027 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Help 30 Vim en Help Introduction Vim has such a diverse list of commands keyboard shortcuts buffers and so on It s impossible to remember how all of them work In fact it is not even useful to know all of them The best situation is that you know how to look for certain functionality in Vim whenever you need it For example you want to avoid having to type a long name every time you suddenly remember there is an abbreviations feature in Vim that ll help you do just that but don t remember how to use it What do you do Let s look at the various ways of finding help about how to use Vim The help command The first and most important place to try to look for help is the built in documentation and Vim has one of the most comprehensive user manuals that I ve ever seen In our case just run help abbreviation and you ll be taken to the help for abbreviations and you can read about how to use the ab and iab commands Sometimes it can be as simple as that If you don t know what you re looking for then you can run help user manual and browse through the list of contents of the entire user manual and read the chapter that you feel is relevant to what you re trying to do How to read the help topic Le
4. vim ftplugin xmlheader vim Now all we need to do in the xmlheader vim is to set the first and second lines of the file Vim plugin to add XML header information to a new XML file call setline l lt xml version 1 0 gt call setline 2 lt DOCTYPE article PUBLIC OASIS DTD DocBook XML V4 5 EN http www oasis open org docbook xml 4 5 docbookx dtd gt So now restart Vim ensure that test xml file doesn t already exist and run e test xml You will see that the header is already filled in Vim en Plugins 65 Syntax scheme We just wrote a DocBook XML file in the previous section It would have been helpful if there was some color coding for the XML file for valid DocBook tags to make sure we re writing it correctly It turns out that this is possible if we just run set filetype docbkxml What happens is that Vim uses the syntax file located in VIMRUNTIME syntax docbkxml vim The syntax file defines how the parts of the file relate to each other For example the syntax file for XML defines what tags are and what colors should be given to tag names etc Using a syntax scheme Let us see a syntax file in action Download the mkd vim 7 script which is a syntax file for the Markdown syntax 8 Markdown is basically a format in which plain text can be written so that the format can be converted to HTML later 1 Open a new file in Vim called test markdown txt 2 Run set syntax mkd 3 Type the f
5. Vim en Typing Skills 24 Vim graphical keyboard cheat sheet If you want to know how each key can map to something useful in Vim 2 vi vim graphical cheat sheet see this Vim graphical cheat sheet by E 15 1 4 jng Al ee ee Although a lot of commands are listed for now you only need to learn the basic hjkl keys which translates to left down up right keys respectively You ll learn more about this in the next chapter a er cr vi vim cheat sheet by viemu com Notice that our efficiency in using Vim is directly proportional to the efficiency of using the keyboard Previous Next External links 1 http en wikipedia org wiki Home row 2 http www bigpants ca juggling images Controls Keyboard HomeRow gif 3 http www typeonline co uk lesson1 html 4 http www viemu com a vi vim graphical cheat sheet tutorial html Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php titlexVim en Typing_ Skills amp oldid 1237 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Moving Around Introduction Once you ve written the initial text editing and rewriting reguires a lot of movement between the various parts of the document For example you re writing a story and you suddenly get an idea for a new plot but to develop this plot you need to go back to the part where the protagonist enters the new city or something like that how do you guickly move around the text so that you don t lose your train
6. e HOME vimrc and SHOME gvimrc on Windows HOME vimrc and HOME gvimrc on Linux BSD Mac OS X See help vimrc on the exact location on your system These vimrc and gvimrc files can contain any Vim commands The convention followed is to use only simple settings in the vimrc files and advanced stuff are sourced from plugins For example here s a portion of my vimrc file My Vimrc file Maintainer www swaroopch com contact Reference Initially based on http dev gentoo org ciaranm docs vim guide License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Use Vim settings rather then Vi settings much better This must be first because it changes other options as a side effect set nocompatible Enable syntax highlighting syntax on Automatically indent when adding a curly bracket etc set smartindent Tabs should be converted to a group of 4 spaces This is the official Python convention http www python org dev peps pep 0008 I didn t find a good reason to not use it everywhere set shiftwidth 4 set tabstop 4 set expandtab set smarttab Vim en Plugins 59 Minimal number of screen lines to keep above and below the cursor set scrolloff 999 Use UTF 8 set encoding utf 8 Set color scheme that I like if has gui running colorscheme desert else colorscheme darkblue endif Status line set laststatus 2 set statusline set statusliner amp 3 3nM
7. 1 ste repr error ste dealloc Py_XDECREF scopes symtable new Py XDECREF local Pysymtable Build Py_XDECREF newbound Pysymtable Free Py XDECREF newglobal PySymtable Lookup Py XDECREF newfree PyST_GetScope if success analyze name assert PyErr Occurred gt analyze cells return success check_unoptimized P update symbols analyze block tatic int mtable analyze struct symtable st 2 Install the taglist vim 3 plugin Refer the install details on the script page 3 Run TlistToggle to open the taglist window Voila now you can browse through parts of your program such as macros typedefs variables and functions mtable warn symtable exit block Pyobject free global symtable enter block i symtable lookup symtable add def free PySet_New NULL symtable new tmpname if free symtable visit stmt return 0 symtable visit expr global PySet_New MULL symtable implicit arg if tglobal symtable visit params Py DECREF free symtable visit arganno return 0 symtable visit annotat symtable visit argumen r analyze block st gt st_top NULL free global symtable visit excepth Py DECREF free symtable visit alias Py_DECREF global symtable visit compreh return 4 You can use tag foo to jump to Taglist in action the definition of foo 5 Position your cursor on any symbol and press ctrl to jump to the definition of that symbol Vim en Programmers Editor 73
8. 3 set filetype viki 4 Type the following text http deplate sourceforge net Markup html Viki syntax 5 iW 6 Position your cursor on the above text and press ctrl enter or alternatively press vf 7 You should see a web browser open up with the above website page open Similarly you can write down any file name with a valid path whether it is a doc file or a pdf file and then you can ctrl enter to open the file in the corresponding Word or Acrobat Reader programs The idea is that you can use plain text files to hold all your thinking together and you can ctrl enter your way into everything else Now notice that we had to type the square brackets in pairs above to identify the target of the link and the words that describe the link This is basically the syntax of the markup language which we will explore next Markup language The Viki syntax 5 page that you just opened in your web browser explains how to write the text to allow Viki to syntax highlight portions of your text as well as how to do the linking between wiki pages and even write Viki specific comments Learning the basics of the syntax highlighting is useful because you can visually see the parts of your text file For example use List of things to do to make it a header and then use dashes to create a list List of things to do Finish the blog post on Brahmagiri trek Fix footer bug on IONLAB website Buy some blank CDs Get
9. Move the cursor to the 5th line in the following text the words by John Lennon Use ma to create a mark named a Move the cursor to wherever you want for example 4j I am eagerly awaiting my next disappointment Ashleigh Brilliant Every man s memory is his private literature Aldous Huxley Life is what happens to you while you re busy making other plans John Lennon Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated Confucius Do not dwell in the past do not dream of the future concentrate the mind on the present moment Buddha The more decisions that you are forced to make alone the more you are aware of your freedom to choose Thornton Wilder Press a i e single quote followed by the name of the mark and voila Vim jumps back to the line where that mark was located You can use any alphabet a zA Z to name a mark which means you can have up to 52 named marks for each file Vim en Moving Around 29 Jump around In the various movements that we have learned we might often want to jump back to the previous location or to the next location after a movement To do this simply press ctrl o to jump to the previous location and ctrl i to jump forward to the next location again Parts of the text There are various ways you can specify text objects in Vim so that you can pass them toa command For example you want to visually select a part of the text and then convert the case from upp
10. runtime ftplugin python snippets vim and see if that helps 4 Your cursor is now positioned on the function name i e fname 5 Type the function name say test 6 Press lt tab gt and the cursor is automatically moved to the arguments Tab again to move to the next item to be filled 7 Now enter a comment Just say Hi 8 Tab again and type print Hello World 9 Press tab 10 Your program is complete Vim en Programmers Editor 76 You should now see def test Just say Hi print Hello World The best part is that SnippetsEmu enables a standard convention to be followed and that nobody in the team forgets it Creating Snippets Let s now see how to create our own snippets Let us consider the case where I tend to repeatedly write the following kind of code in ActionScript3 private var foo 0bject public function get foo 0bject return foo public function set foo value Object _foo value This is a simple getter setter combination using a backing variable The problem is that s an awful lot of boilerplate code to write repeatedly Let s see how to automate this The SnippetsEmu language snippets plugins assume st as the start tag and et as the end tag these are the same arrow type symbols you see in between which we enter our code Let s start with a simple example exec Snippet pubfun public function Wy Slo et 8 SE et SERIES Sisal SOR are Add the above l
11. set statusline f filename set statusline h m r w status flags set statuslinet strlen amp ft amp ft none file type set statuslinet right align remainder set status line 0x 8B character value set status lLine t 14 L c V line character set status linet lt P file position buffer number Show line number cursor position set ruler Display incomplete commands set showcmd To insert timestamp press F3 nmap lt F3 gt a lt C R gt strftime Y m d a I M Sp lt CR gt lt Esc gt imap lt F3 gt lt C R gt strftime Y m d a I M p lt CR gt To save press ctrl s nmap lt c s gt w lt CR gt imap lt c s gt lt Esc gt w lt CR gt a Search as you type set incsearch Ignore case when searching set ignorecase Show autocomplete menus Vim en Plugins 60 set wildmenu Show editing mode set showmode Error bells are displayed visually set visualbell Notice that these commands are not prefixed by colon The colon is optional when writing scripts in files because it assumes they are normal mode commands If you want to learn detailed usage of each setting mentioned above refer help A portion of my gvimrc file is Size of GVim window set lines 35 columns 99 Don t display the menu or toolbar Just the screen set guioptions m set guioptions T Font Very important if has win32 has win64 set guifont Monaco
12. 36 AM IST Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Make sure we run only once if exists loaded related finish endif let loaded related 1 Look up Yahoo Search and show results to the user function Related python lt lt EOF import vim from yahoo search web import RelatedSuggestion search RelatedSuggestion app id vimsearch query vim current line results search parse results msg Related popular searches are n FU for result in results msg d S n i result it 1 print msg EOF endfunction Vim en Scripting 57 Notice that we use the current line in Vim as the current text we are interested in you can change this to any text that you want such as the current word etc We use the yahoo search web RelatedSuggestion class to query Yahoo Search for phrases related to the query that we specify We get back the results by calling parse results onthe result object We then loop over the results and display it to the user 1 Run source related vim 2 Type the text c v raman 3 Run call Related 4 The output should look something like this Related popular searches are 1 raman effect 2 C v raman india 3 raman research institute 4 chandrasekhara venkata raman Summary We have explored scripting using the Vim s own scripting language as well as using external scripting programming languages This is imp
13. 7 Close Vim by running q Congratulations You just wrote your first file using Vim Does this seem like a lot of steps Yes it does at first That is because this is the first time we are getting used to opening Vim writing a file and closing Vim You have to keep in mind that this will only be a minor part of your time compared to the actual time that goes into in editing the content of the document Let us see what the above commands do edit hello txt orsimply e hello Hello World 1 hello txt none 6x0 1 12 gt INSERT Hello wori 1 hello txt none 6x64 LAL gt Hello World hello txt none 0x64 1 hello txt none 6x64 1 11 gt g txt Vim en First Steps 17 This opens a file for editing If the file with the specified name does not exist it will be created the first time we save the file Press i e This switches Vim to the insert mode Type the text Hello World e This is where you type the actual text that you want to write Press lt Esc gt This escapes Vim back to normal mode write or simply w This tells Vim to write the text which is currently stored in the computer s memory to the file on the hard disk This means that whatever we wrote so far is now permanently stored guit or simply g to guit the file in the window that we are editing If there was only one window open this will also close Vim Concept of windows will be discus
14. Just add the prefix count to w 2w The polar regions a re of special interest as they might contain ice Similarly to move to the e nd of the next word press e The polar regions ar e of special interest as they might contain ice To move one word b ackward press b By prefixing a count 2b will go back by 2 words The polar r egions are of special interest as they might contain ice See help word motions for details We have seen character motions and word motions let s move on to sentences C handrayaan 1 is India s first mission to the moon Launched by India s national space agency the Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO The unmanned lunar exploration mission includes a lunar orbiter and an impactor The spacecraft was launched by a modified version of the PSLV XL on 22 October 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sriharikota Andhra Pradesh at 06 23 IST 00 52 UTC The vehicle was successfully inserted into lunar orbit on 8 November 2008 The Moon Impact Probe was successfully impacted at the lunar south pole at 20 31 hours on 14 November 2008 Position the cursor at the first character To move to the next sentence press Vim en Moving Around 28 Chandrayaan 1 is India s first mission to the moon L aunched by India s national space agency the Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO The unmanned lunar exploration mission includes a lunar orbiter and an impactor The spacecraft was launched by
15. Press ctrl t to return to the previous code you were reading 6 Use ctrl w to jump to the definition of the symbol in a split window 7 Use tnext tprev tfirst tlast to move between matching tags Note that exuberant Ctags supports 33 programming languages as of this writing and it can easily be extended for other languages See help taglist intro for details cscope To be able to jump to definitions across files we need a program like cscope However as the name suggests this particular program works only for the C programming language 1 Install cscope Refer help File Edit View Terminal Tabs Help cscope info and help Cscope tag Py CLEAR line filename context line cscope win32 regarding FE a 2 524 Python import c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt installation Py CLEAR interp gt modules reloading 7 4 3 109 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt 2 Copy cscope maps vim to your Py_CLEAR interp gt codec search path 4 110 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt 1 1 7 Py CLEAR interp gt codec search cache vim plugin directory 5 lll Python pystat e lt lt GLOBAL gt gt Py CLEAR interp gt codec error registry 3 Switch to your source code 6 112 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt i Py CLEAR interp gt modules directory and run cscope R b 7 113 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt Py CLEAR interp gt modules by index Ihh Ly 8 114 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt g
16. When Vim starts up in normal mode we have seen how to use i to get into insert mode There are other ways of switching from normal mode to insert mode as well e Run e dapping txt Pressi Type the following paragraph including all the typos and mistakes we ll correct them later Vim en Modes 19 means being determined about being determined and being passionate about being passionate Press lt Esc gt key to switch back to normal mode Run w Oops we seem to have missed a word at the beginning of the line and our cursor is at the end of the line what do we do now What would be the most efficient way of going to the start of the line and insert the missing word Should we use the mouse to move the cursor to the start of the line Should we use arrow keys to travel all the way to the start of the line Should we press home key and then press i to switch back to insert mode again It turns out that the most efficient way to be press I upper case I Press I TypeDappin Press lt Esc gt key to switch back to the normal mode Notice that we used a different key to switch to insert mode its specialty is that it moves the cursor to the start of the line and then switches to the insert mode Also notice how important it is to switch back to the normal mode as soon as you re done typing the text Making this a habit will be beneficial because most of your work after the initial writing phase will be in the normal
17. You should now see This is the first paragraph This is the second paragraph Let s see a bigger case How do we yank the current paragraph Operation Text Object Motion Yank Current paragraph y ap So yap will copy the current paragraph Now that we have done copying the text how do we paste it Just p it You should now see This is the first paragraph This is the first paragraph This is the second paragraph Notice that the blank line is also copied when we do yap so p adds that extra blank line as well There are two types of paste that can be done exactly like the two types of inserts we have seen before p lower case paste after current cursor position P upper case paste before current cursor position Taking the idea further we can combine these into more powerful ways How to swap two characters Press xp e x gt delete one character at current cursor position e p gt paste after current cursor position How to swap two words Press dwwP e d gt delete w gt one word e w gt move to the next word Vim en Editing Basics 36 P gt paste before the current cursor position The important thing is not to learn these operations by rote These combinations of operations and text objects motions should be automatic for your fingers without you needing to put in mental effort This happens when you make using these a habit Marking your territory You are writing and you sudden
18. Your books should sell like hot cakes for their way of presentation Deepak 7 Awesome Thank you for all of your hard work It is especially nice that the beginning starts the reader off gradually After using vim for a couple of years I ve forgotten how weird it seems at first so I probably wouldn t explain it that good to someone I will be sure to share your book to spread the vim propaganda Fy Joseph Sullivan 8 Vim What I am trying to say is if you have basic computer competency you should immediately get Vim on your machine and improve your life The best place to learn about is to read Swaroop C H s awesome eBook A Byte of Vim it will revolutionize how you think about text editors in the future wooden nickels 9 Have been thumbing through byte of vim learning a ton even having used vim for years Josh Nichols 10 Great Book Although I use vim everyday as an editor as well as an ide the book makes u realise how much more it can do Raseel Bhagat 11 Wonderful This was one most required book I was a vim user for the past years but never have seen these much of facilities inside that Thanks for the Book Swaroop Hiran Venugopalan 12 What a nice book I m a long time vim user but never managed to get my head around vim scripting apart from fixing some bugs in others scripts This is the best introduction to Vim scripting writing plugins syntax files I have seen s
19. a modified version of the PSLV XL on 22 October 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sriharikota Andhra Pradesh at 06 23 IST 00 52 UTC The vehicle was successfully inserted into lunar orbit on 8 November 2008 The Moon Impact Probe was successfully impacted at the lunar south pole at 20 31 hours on 14 November 2008 Isn t that cool To move to the previous sentence press Go ahead try it out and see how fast you can move Again you can prefix a count such as 3 to move forward by 3 sentences Now use the whole text and try out moving by paragraphs Press to move to the next paragraph and to move to the previous paragraph Notice that the bigger brackets is for the bigger text object If you had already noticed this then congratulations you have already started to think like a winner err think like a Vimmer Again don t try to remember these keys try to make it a habit such that your fingers naturally use these keys See help cursor motions for more details Make your mark You are writing some text but you suddenly remember that you have to update a related section in the same document but you do not want to forget where you are currently so that you can come back to this later What do you do Normally this would mean scrolling to that section update it and then scroll back to where you were This is a lot of overhead and we may tend to forget where we were last at We can do things a bit smarter in Vim
20. beneficial to us Feel free to explore these and many more Vim scripts 16 to help you ease your editing and make it even more convenient Previous Next External links 1 http portablegvim sourceforge net 2 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1853 3 http mysite verizon net astronaut vim 4 http www vim org scripts script php script id 294 5 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1953 6 http vimperator mozdev org 7 http www moolenaar net habits html 8 http video google com videoplay docid 2538831956647446078 amp q 22Google engEDU 22 9 http groups google com group vim_dev 10 http www vim org scripts 11 http vim wikia com 12 http vimdoc sourceforge net 13 http www vim org maillist php vim 14 http delicious com popular vim 15 http www reddit com r vim 16 http www vim org scripts Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim__ en More amp oldid 1043 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en What Next Introduction We have explored so much about Vim so what next Well if you have learned understood and made Vim a habit then you are officially a Vimmer Congratulations 1 Now immediately send me a mai thanking me for this book This step is optional but recommended Also please consider making a donation 2 to support the continued development of this book or donate to the Vim project to help chil
21. co uk vimtips html 5 http vimdoc sourceforge net htmldoc usr_toc html Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_en What_ Next amp oldid 1105 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Feedback This book is a work in progress Your feedback is essential to improving the book So please do send in your comments Hl This book is also available on its official website as a wiki l so that means you can go ahead and fix things yourself as well Known Gaps are Inconsistent use of examples Current strength is the later chapters for experienced Vimmers as opposed to the beginners chapters Vim en Feedback 86 Previous Next External links 1 http www swaroopch com contact 2 http www swaroopch com notes Vim Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Feedback amp oldid 1106 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Charityware Vim is charityware If you find Vim useful you are encouraged to help the ICCF Holland foundation in any way you can From their website The south of Uganda has been suffering from the highest HIV infection rate in the world Parents die of AIDS just when their children need them most An extended family can be their new home Fortunately there is enough food in this farming district But who will pay their school fees provide medical aid and help them grow up That is where ICCF Holland helps in the hope that they will be able
22. default mode in which Vim starts up Insert mode is where you insert i e write the text e Visual mode is where you visually select a bunch of text so that you can run a command operation only on that part of the text Normal mode By default you re in normal mode Let s see what we can do in this mode Type echo hello world and press enter You should see the famous words hello world echoed back to you What you just did was run a Vim command called echo and you supplied some text to it which was promptly printed back Type hello and press the enter key Vim will search for that phrase and will jump to the first occurrence This was just two simple examples of the kind of commands available in the normal mode We will see many more such commands in later chapters How to use the help Almost as important as knowing the normal mode is knowing how to use the help command This is where you learn more about the commands available in Vim Remember that you do not need to know every command available in Vim it s better to simply know where to find them when you need them For example see help usr toc takes us to the table of contents of the reference manual You can see help index to search for the particular topic you are interested in for example run insert mode to see the relevant information regarding insert mode If you can t remember these two help topics at first just press Fl or simply run help Insert mode
23. en Moving Around 27 e Move the cursor to the first line by pressing 1G e Move 20 characters to the right by pressing 20L e Move back to the first character by pressing Jump to the last character by pressing e Press G to jump to the last line What if you wanted to the middle of the text that is currently being shown in the window Press H to jump as h igh as possible first line of the window e Press M to jump to the m iddle of the window Press L to jump as l ow as possible last line being displayed You must have started to notice the emphasis on touch typing and never having to move your hands off the main area That s a good thing Words sentences paragraphs We have seen how to move by characters and lines But we tend to think of our text as words and how we put them together sentences paragraphs sections and so on So why not move across such text parts i e text objects Let s take the first few words from our sample text The polar regions are of special interest as they might contain ice First let s position the cursor on the first character by pressing T he polar regions are of special interest as they might contain ice Note that we are using the sguare brackets to mark the cursor position Want to move to the next w ord Press w The cursor should now be at the p in polar The p olar regions are of special interest as they might contain ice How about moving 2 words forward
24. first column respectively Let s see the first case We have typed an extra r which we have to remove Press 3w to move forward by 3 words Now we need to delete one character at the current cursor position Note that there are two parts to this Operation Text Object Motion Delete One character at current cursor position d 1 So we have to just press dl and we delete one character Notice that we can use l even though it is a motion Now we notice that the whole word is redundant because we have the twice Now think carefully on what should be fastest key combination to fix this Take some time to think and figure this out for yourself If not please read on Operation Text Object Motion Delete Word d w So press dw and you delete a word Voila So simple and so beautiful The beauty is that such simple concepts can be combined to provide such a rich range of possibilities How do we achieve the same operation for lines Well lines are considered special in Vim because lines are usually how we think about our text As a shortcut if you repeat the Vim en Editing Basics 35 operation name twice it will operate on the line So dd will delete the current line and yy will yank the current line Our example text in Vim should now look like this This is the first paragraph This is the second line This is the second paragraph Go to the second line by pressing j Now press dd and the line should be deleted
25. h16 http jeffmilner com index php 2005 07 30 windows vista fonts now available set guifont Consolas h12 cANSI elseif has unix let amp guifont Monospace 10 endif There are various examples vimrc files out there 2 that you should definitely take a look at and learn the various kinds of customizations that can be done then pick the ones you like and put it in your own vimrc A few good ones that I have found in the past are e vi improved org s vimrc 3 Amir Salihefendic s vimrc It is a known fact that a person s vimrc usually reflects how long that person has been using Vim Global plugin Global plugins can be used to provide global generic functionality Global plugins can be stored in two places 1 SVIMRUNTIME plugin for standard plugins supplied by Vim during its installation 2 To install your own plugins or plugins that you have download from somewhere you can use your own plugin directory HOME vim plugin on Linux BSD Mac OS X Vim en Plugins 61 e SHOME S vimfiles plugin on Windows See help runtimepath for details on your plugin directories Let s see how to use a plugin A useful plugin to have is highlight current line vim 5 by Ansuman Mohanty which does exactly as the name suggests Download the latest version of the file highlight current line vim and put it in your plugin directory as mentioned above Now restart Vim and open any file Notice how the current line is highli
26. help us and that is exactly where Vim shines and is far better compared to most plain text editors and rich document editors Why Write This Book I have been using the Vim editor ever since I learned to use the old vi editor during Unix classes in college Vim is one of the few pieces of software that I use for nearly 10 hours a day I knew there were just so many features that I didn t know about but could potentially be useful to me so I started exploring Vim little by little To crystallize my understanding and to help others also explore Vim I started writing this collection of notes and called it a book Some of the principles I have tried to keep in mind while writing these notes are 1 Simple literature The importance of this should be reinforced again and again 2 Emphasis on examples and how to 3 The one stop shop for readers to learn Vim from getting started to learning advanced stuff 4 Get the user to understand how to do things the Vim way from modes to buffers to customization Most people learn only the basic vi commands and do not attempt to learn anything beyond that Learning such concepts is the tipping point they become hardcore Vim users i e Vimmers which means they extract the most out of Vim which is the intent of this book 5 A lot of things are documented and stored here as a reference for people such as how to use Vim as an IDE etc There are various ways of doing it and instead of the user st
27. it could be guickly filled in the next time you use the same word You have some data where only the first 10 characters in each line are useful and the rest is no longer useful for you How do you get only that data What if you received a document from someone which is in all caps find it irritating and want to convert it to lower case Press gf which means g o to this f ile Run colorscheme desert to choose the desert color scheme my favorite Run nmap lt c s gt w lt CR gt Note that lt CR gt means a c arriage r eturn i e the enter key Run mksession latest_session vim and open Vim next time as vim S latest_session vim Run syntax on If it doesn t recognize the language properly use set filetype Wikipedia for example Run set foldmethod indent assuming your file is properly indented There are other methods of folding as well Use tabedit lt file gt to open multiple files in tabs just like browser tabs and use ctrl pgup ctrl pgdn to switch between the tabs Press ctrl n and see the list of completions for the current word based on all the words that you have used in the current document Alternatively use ab mas Maslow s hierarchy of needs to expand the abbreviation automatically when you type m a s lt space gt Press ctrl v select the text and press y to copy the selected rows and columns of text In Vim run the following for i in range 0 line call setlin
28. match ourBold lt b gt lt b gt highlight default ourBold term bold cterm bold gui bold The first line says that we are creating a new type of syntax based on matching a pattern with name ourBold and the regex pattern as specified above The second line says that we want to highlight the ourBold syntax The scheme we are specifying is the default scheme which means it can be overridden by the user or by other color schemes We can specify three different ways of representing ourBold for the three different kinds of displays that Vim can run in black and white terminals color terminals and the GUI graphical version Sometimes we want to specify some task in our text as a todo item and we usually write it in caps TODO but if we want to make it stand out further syntax keyword ourTodo TODO FIXME XXX hi def link ourTodo Todo First we define that ourTodo consists of keywords these are plain simple words that need to be highlighted and we link this pattern group ourTodo to a pre existing group called Todo in Vim There are many such pre existing groups in Vim which have predefined color schemes It is best to link our syntax styles to the existing groups See help group name for a list of the groups available Next we can have specific blocks of code in the group enclosedin code code so how do we highlight this syn region amiCode excludenl start code end code hi def link amiCode Iden
29. mode that s where the all important rewriting editing polishing happens Now let s take a different variation of the i command Notice that pressing i will place your cursor before the current position and then switch to insert mode To place the cursor a fter the current position press a Pressa Typeg to complete the word as Dapping Press lt Esc gt to switch back to normal mode Similar to the relationship between i and I keys there is a relationship between the a and A keys if you want to append text at the end of the line press the A key Press A Type put a dot to complete the sentence properly e Press lt Esc gt to switch back to the normal mode To summarize the four keys we have learnt so far Command Action i insert text just before the cursor I insert text at the start of the line a append text just after the cursor A append text at the end of the line Notice how the upper case commands are bigger versions of the lower case commands Now that we are proficient in quickly moving in the current line let s see how to move to new lines If you want to o pen a new line to start writing press the o key Press 0 Type I m a rapper Vim en Modes 20 Press lt Esc gt to switch back to the normal mode Hmmm it would be more appealing if that new sentence we wrote was in a paragraph by itself e Press 0 upper case O Press lt Esc gt to switch back to the normal mode T
30. motorbike serviced Disabling CamelCase Writing CamelCase can create a wiki link in Viki but I personally dislike this I prefer that only explicit links like CamelCase be allowed to avoid situations where I have genuinely used a name which uses camel case but I don t want it to be a link for example the word JavaScript To disable camel case syntax edit vimfiles plugin viki vim and change the following line line number 120 as of this writing if exists g vikiNameTypes let g vikiNameTypes csSeuix endif 2 to if exists g vikiNameTypes let g vikiNameTypes sSeuix endif 2 Vim en Personal Information Management 46 Notice that the c is removed Getting Things Done One of the major reasons for creating this viki for myself is to maintain a Getting Things Done system Getting Things Done GTD is a system devised by David Allen to help manage your stuff which could mean anything from your career plans to the list of chores you have to do today A good introduction to GTD can be found on bnet com 6 From David Allen s book Get everything out of your head Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up not when it blows up Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories Keep your system current complete and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you re doing and not doing at any ti
31. practicing these keys e Position your cursor at the first letter C of the document e Press 2j and it should skip the current long line the blank line and go to the second line i e second paragraph Press 2k to get back to where we were Or alternatively press ctrl o to jump back Press 5l to move 5 characters to the right Press 5h to move left by 5 characters Or alternatively press ctrl o to jump back Make it a habit to use the hjkl keys instead of the arrow keys Within a few tries you ll notice how much faster you can be using these keys Similarly there are more simple keys that replace the following special movements Notice that this again is intended to reduce hand movement In this particular case people are prone to searching and hunting for these special keys so we can avoid that altogether Traditional Vim home key moves to the start of the line key think anchored to the start end key moves to the end of the line key think the buck stops here pgup key moves one screen up ctrl b which means move one screen b ackward pgdn key moves one screen down ctrl f which means move one screen f orward If you know the absolute line number that you want to jump to say line 50 press 50G and Vim will jump to the 50th line If no number is specified G will take you to the last line of the file How do you get to the top of the file Simple press 1G Notice how a single key can do so much Vim
32. script php script id 90 http vim wikia com wiki Using vim as an IDE all in one http phraktured net vimmity vim vim html http www vim org scripts script php script id 1643 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1074 http www vim org scripts script php script id 2043 http vim wikia com wiki Online documentation for word under cursor http www vim org scripts script php script id 356 http stackoverflow com guestions tagged vim http www catonmat net tag vim Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php titlexVim en Programmers_ Editor amp oldid 1245 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en More 82 Vim en More Introduction We ve explored so many features of Vim but we still haven t covered them all so let s take a quick wild ride through various topics that are useful and fun Modeline What if you wanted to specify that a certain file should always use pure tabs and no spaces while editing Can we enforce that within the file itself Yes just put vim noexpandtab within the first two lines or last two lines of your file An example Sample Makefile Cpp CXX CXXFLAGS lt o vim noexpandtab This line that we are adding is called a modeline Portable Vim If you keep switching between different computers isn t it a pain to maintain your Vim setup exactly the same on each machine Wouldn t it useful if you could just carry Vim around in your own USB disk
33. shouldn t be available globally because we want to avoid interfering with other scripts We use the map command to define a shortcut The lt Leader gt key is usually backslash We are now mapping lt Leader gt c i e the leader key followed by the c key to some functionality We are using lt Plug gt Capitalize to indicate the Capitalize function described within a plugin i e our own script Every script has an ID which is indicated by lt SID gt So we can map the command lt SID gt Capitalize toa call of the local function Capitalize So now repeat the same steps mentioned previously to test this script but you can now run MAC to capitalize the line s instead of running call Capitalize This last set of steps may seem complicated but it just goes to show that there s a wealth of possibilities in creating Vim scripts and they can do complex stuff If something does go wrong in your scripting you can use v errmsg to see the last error message which may give you clues to figure out what went wrong Note that you can use help to find help on everything we have discussed above from help AW to help setline Vim en Scripting 55 Using external programming languages Many people would not like to spend the time in learning Vim s scripting language and may prefer to use a programming language they already know and write plugins for Vim in that language This is possible because Vim supports writing pl
34. you do not have programming experience you can skip this chapter For those who love programming let s dive in and see Vim can help you in writing code Vim en Programmers Editor 71 Simple stuff The simplest feature of Vim that you can utilize to help you in writing code is to use syntax highlighting This allows you to visualize i e see your code which helps you in reading and writing your code faster and also helps avoid making obvious mistakes Syntax highlighting Suppose you are editing a vim syntax file run set filetype vim and see Oot Y BILI the open tog with specified attributes how Vim adds color Similarly if you nedi cyfan yw by ek nk coeds ik the block are editing a Python file run set igen tah u opes tag lt s tag filetype python Er me AIT arte can be onyt if k alt or v open tag append s s k v To see the list of language types ally available check the close tag open tag append gt VIMRUNTIME syntax directory return join open tag Tip def GG attributes None clear None If you want the power of syntax lt p gt tag and breaking Lines with cbr gt Paragraphs ore formtted wi a e inline rules highlighting for any Unix shell h1 Paragraph output just pipe it to Vim for TC eA TE example svn diff vim R Notice the dash in the end which tells Vim that it should read text from its standard input Smart indentation An experienced progr
35. A Byte of Vim v0 51 for Vim version 7 PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit see http code pediapress com for more information Vim Vim Introduction A Byte of Vim is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor version 7 even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful such as windows and tabs personal information management making it a programmer s editor how to extend Vim with your own plugins and more Read Now Read the whole book online now If you find any typos spelling mistakes you are encouraged to click on the Edit link in the left sidebar and fix it Buy the Book A printed hardcopy of the book can be purchased 1 for your offline reading pleasure and to support the continued development and improvement of this book Alternatively please consider making a donation 21 Download PDF 1 5MB 3 e Mediawiki XML dump 197K 4 for advanced users only What Readers Say Well done I ve been only using vim for like 2 3 weeks now and thus I can say that it s just perfect for beginners like me Jay l The book is very good and fun to read too Thank you for sharing it Yosi Izaq 6
36. I d spend six hours sharpening my axe And to get to this stage you need to do Step 1 which boils down to one thing It s all in the mind That s why it s so hard Now start editing the first line 1 Press S to s ubstitute the whole line 2 Type the text After much thought I have coined a new phrase to help me solidify my approach 3 Press lt esc gt Now think about the change that we just did Is the sentence better Hmm was the text better before How do we switch back and forth Press u to undo the last change and see what we had before You will now see the text I have coined a phrase for myself CUT to the G To come back to the latest Vim en Editing Basics 37 change press ctrl r to now see the line After much thought I have coined a new phrase to help me solidify my approach It is important to note that Vim gives unlimited history of undo redo changes but it is usually limited by the undolevels setting in Vim and the amount of memory in your computer Now let s see some stuff that really shows off Vim s advanced undo redo functionality some thing that other editors will be jealous of Vim is not only your editor it also acts as a time machine For example earlier 4m will take you back by 4 minutes i e the state of the text 4 minutes earlier The power here is that it is superior to all undoes and redoes For example if you make a change then you undo it and then continue editing that cha
37. This is exactly what Portable GVim Mig Just unzip into a directory on the portable disk then run GVimPortable exe You can even store your own vimrc and other related files on the disk and use it anywhere you have a Microsoft Windows computer Upgrade plugins Any sufficiently advanced Vim user would be using a bunch of plugins and scripts added to their vim or vimfiles directory What if we wanted to update them all to the latest versions You could visit the script page for each of them download and install them but there s a better way just run GLVS which stands for G et L atest V im S cripts See help getscript for details There are scripts to even twitter from Vim 2 Dr Chip s plugins Dr Chip has written some amazing Vim plugins the drawit vim which help you to draw actual text based drawings such as all those fancy ASCII diagrams that you have seen before 3 over many years My favorite ones are Another favorite is Align vim 4 which helps you to align consecutive lines together For example say you have the following piece of program code Vim en More 83 a il bbbbb 2 CCCCCCCCCC 3 Just visually select these three lines and press t and voila it becomes like this a il bbbbb CCCCCCCCCC 3 This is much easier to read than before and makes your code look more professional Explore Dr Chip s page to find out about many more interesting plugins Blog from Vim Using th
38. alled tab pages Run tabnew to open a new tab with partl txt part2 txt a new buffer analogous to new Btep 4 is eventually what gets you moving but Steps 2 and 3 are equally important As Abraham Lincoln once said If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I d spend six hours sharpening my axe And to get to this stage you need How do you switch between the ee ee eee ae ee DP tabs By pressing gt to g o to the next t ab and gT to g o in the opposite direction i e the previous t ab beh ee eee I personally prefer to use the keys alt j and alt k for the same operations analogous to how the j and k keys work for characters and also ctrl w j and ctrl w k work for horizontally split windows To enable this add the following lines to your vimrc file Pere ears 2 part2 txt none 6x53 1 1 ALUS Shortcuts for moving between tabs Alt j to move to the tab to the left noremap lt A j gt gT Alt k to move to the tab to the right noremap lt A k gt gt To c lose a tab run tabc or q You can even open text that opens in a new window to open in a new tab instead For example help tabpage opens the help in a horizontally split window To view it in a new tab instead use tab help tabpage If you want to reorder the tabs use tabmove For example to move the current tab to the first position use tabmove 0 and so on See help tabpage for more details on tab pages and the other operatio
39. ammer s code is usually indented properly which makes the code look uniform and the structure of the code is more visually apparent Vim can help by doing the indentation for you so that you can concentrate on the actual code If you indent a particular line and want the lines following it to be also indented to the same level then you can use the set autoindent setting If you start a new block of statements and want the next line to be automatically indented to the next level then you can use the set smartindent setting Note that the behavior of this setting is dependent on the particular programming language being used Bounce If the programming language of your choice uses curly brackets to demarcate blocks of statements place your cursor on one of the curly brackets and press the key to jump to the corresponding curly bracket This bounce key allows you to jump between the start and end of a block quickly Shell commands You can run a shell command from within Vim using the command For example if the date command is available on your operating system run date and you should see the current date and time printed out This is useful in situations where you want to check something with the file system for example quickly checking what files are in the current directory using ls or dir and Vim en Programmers Editor 72 so on If you want access to a full fledged shell run sh We can use this facility to r
40. application such as XChat 2 available for Windows Linux BSD or Colloquy 3 for Mac OS X connect to the FreeNode network join the vim channel and politely ask your question and wait for a response Most of the times someone will reply in a few minutes If nobody answers your question probably they re all busy so try again later or try to rephrase your question such that it makes it easy for someone to help you out Otherwise post a message in the mailing list mentioned above Summary There is a wealth of information on how to do things using Vim and many Vimmers would gladly help you out as well The Vim community is one of the greatest strengths of the Vim editor so make sure to use the resources and do join the growing community as well The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing Isaac Asimov Vim en Help 32 Previous Next External links 1 http tech groups yahoo com group vim msearch adv 2 http www silverex org download 3 http colloquy info Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Help amp oldid 1229 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Editing Basics Introduction Let s learn the basic editing commands in Vim for reading writing files cut copy paste undo redo and searching Reading and writing files Buffers When you edit a file Vim brings the text in the file on the hard disk to the computer s RAM This means that a copy of t
41. are more comfortable in using the arrow keys to select your choice from the omnicompletion list see Vim Tip 1228 7 on how to enable that I prefer to use a simple ctrl space instead of the unwieldy ctrl x ctrl o key combination To achieve this put this in your vimrc imap lt c space gt lt c x gt lt c o gt Relatedly the PySmell plugin 8 may be of help to Vim users who code in Python Using Snippets Code snippets are small pieces of code that you repetitively tend to write Like all good lazy programmers you can use a plugin that helps you to do that In our case we use the amazing SnippetsEmu plugin 1 Download the snippetsEmu 9 plugin 2 Create your vim after directory if it doesn t already exist 3 Start Vim by providing this plugin name on the command line For example start Vim as gvim snippy_bundles vba 4 Run source The vimball will now unpack and store the many files in the appropriate directories 5 Repeat the same process for snippy_plugin vba Now let s try using this plugin 1 Open a new file called say test py 2 Press the keys d e f and then lt tab gt 3 Voila See how snippetsEmu has created a structure of your function already You should now see this in your file def lt fname gt lt args gt lt gt lt args gt lt pass gt lt gt Note In case you see def lt tab gt and nothing else happened then perhaps the snippets plugin is not loaded Run
42. be to use macros 1 Position your cursor on the first letter of the first line tansen is the singer 2 Type ga in normal mode to start recording the macro named as a 3 Type gUl to switch the first letter to upper case 4 Typew to move to the next word 5 Type cw to change the word 6 Type was 7 Press lt Esc gt 8 Type w to move to the next word 9 Type cw to change the word 10 Type a 11 Press lt Esc gt 12 Type A to insert text at the end of the line 13 Type in Akbar s court 14 Press lt Esc gt 15 Type q to stop recording the macro That looks like a long procedure but sometimes this is much easier to do than cook up some complicated substitute commands At the end of the procedure the line should look like this Tansen was a singer in Akbar s court Great Now let s move on to apply this to the other lines Just move to the first character of the second line and press a Voila the line should change to Vim en Scripting 49 Daswant was a painter in Akbar s court This demonstrates that macros can record complicated operations and can be easily replayed This helps the user to replay complicated editing in multiple places This is one type of reusing the manipulations you can do to the text Next we will see more formal ways of manipulating the text Note If you want to simply repeat the last action and not a sequence of actions you do not have to use macros just press do
43. ched from this location 3 All the code scripts provided in this book is licensed under the 3 clause BSD License unless otherwise noted 4 Some sample text used in this book has been retrieved from http en wikipedia org and http en wikiquote org under the GNU Free Documentation License 181 5 Volunteer contributions to this original book must be under this same license and the copyright must be assigned to the main author of this book 17 Translations If you are interested in reading or contributing translations of this book to other human languages please see Translations Next External links 1 http www swaroopch com buybook 2 http www swaroopch com byteofdonate 3 http www swaroopch com files byteofvim byte of vim v050 pdf 4 http www swaroopch com files byteofvim byte of vim v050 xml 5 http groups google com group vim_use msg e1625069d4ea0ef9 6 http groups google com group vim_use msg 09ca306a67b9d2cd 7 http twitter com peerlessdeepak status 1024279089 8 http groups google com group vim_use msg 362a82a4af132317 9 http woodennickels posterous com text editing your way to heave 10 http twitter com techpickles status 1025775542 11 http twitter com raseel status 1024291090 12 http www swaroopch com blog a free book on vim comment 116472 13 http www swaroopch com notes Talk Vim 14 http groups google com group vim_use msg dac94f3332f733e4 15 http vim wikia com wiki Mai
44. context on whether you want to simply type stuff or you want to run some commands on the text Isn t that simple Traditionally the concept of modes is the most oft cited reason by beginners on why they find Vim confusing I compare it to riding a bicycle you ll trip a few times but once you ve got the hang of it you ll wonder what the fuss was all about So why does Vim have modes To make things as simple as possible even though it s usage may seem strange at first What do I mean by that Let s take an example one of the key goals in Vim is to make it fully accessible from the keyboard without ever having to need to use a mouse you can still use the mouse if you want to but it is strictly optional In such a scenario how would you distinguish between the text you want to write and the commands that you want to run Vim s solution is to have a normal mode where you can execute commands and an insert mode where you are simply writing text You can switch between the two modes any time For example pressing i switches Vim to insert mode and pressing lt Esc gt switches Vim back to normal mode How do traditional editors achieve this distinction between commands and writing text By using graphical menus and keyboard shortcuts The problem is that this does not scale First of all if you have hundreds of commands creating menus for each of these commands would be insane and confusing Secondly customizing how to use each o
45. d help replacing Visual mode Suppose that you want to select a bunch of words and replace them completely with some new text that you want to write What do you do One way would be to use the mouse to click at the start of the text that you are interested in hold down the left mouse button drag the mouse till the end of the relevant text and then release the left mouse button This seems like an awful lot of distraction We could use the lt Del gt or lt Backspace gt keys to delete all the characters but this seems even worse in efficiency The most efficient way would be to position the cursor at the start of the text press v to start the visual mode use arrow keys or any text movement commands to the move to the end of the relevant text for example press 5e to move to the end of the 5th word counted from the current cursor position and then press c to c hange the text Notice the improvement in efficiency In this particular operation the c command you ll be put into insert mode after it is over so press lt Esc gt to return to normal mode The v command works on a character basis If you want to operate in terms of lines use the upper case V Vim en Modes 22 Summary Here is a drawing of the relationship between the different modes i I a A 0 0 r R S S Normal gt Insert mode mode lt lt Esc gt
46. dbext vim plugin 21 The best part is that this plugin helps you to edit SQL written within PHP Perl Java etc and you can even directly execute the SQL even though it is embedded within another programming language and even asking you for values for variables Vim en Programmers Editor 81 Su mmary We have learned how Vim can be used for programming with the help of various plugins and settings If we need a feature it can be solved by writing our own Vim plugins as we have discussed in the Scripting chapter A good source of related discussions is at Stack Overflow 23 22 and Peteris Krumins s blog Previous Next External links 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 http www codinghorror com blog archives 001188 html http ctags sourceforge net http www vim org scripts script php script id 273 http cscope sourceforge net cscope maps vim http www vim org scripts script php script id 1638 http vim sourceforge net scripts script php script id 213 http www vim org tips tip php tip id 1228 http code google com p pysmell http www vim org scripts script php script id 1318 http www vim org scripts script php script id 69 http www vim org scripts script php script id 889 http www vim org scripts script php script_id 1941 http www vim org scripts script php script_id 240 http www vim org scripts
47. de Command Action s substitute the current character S substitute the current line Let s go back our last action Can t we make it more efficient since we want to r eplace just a single character Yes we can use the r key Move the cursor to the first character of the word sinner Press r Typed Notice we re already back in the normal mode and didn t need to press lt Esc gt Vim en Modes 21 There s a bigger version of r called R which will replace continuous characters Move the cursor to the i in sinner PressR Type app the word now becomes dapper Press lt Esc gt to switch back to normal mode Command Action r replace the current character R replace continuous characters The text should now look like this Dapping means being determined about being determined and being passionate about being passionate Be a dapper Phew We have covered a lot in this chapter but I guarantee that this is the only step that is the hardest Once you understand this you ve pretty much understood the heart and soul of how Vim works and all other functionality in Vim is just icing on the cake To repeat understanding how modes work and how switching between modes work is the key to becoming a Vimmer so if you haven t digested the above examples yet please feel free to read them again Take all the time you need If you want to read more specific details about these commands see help inserting an
48. dren in Uganda Next I recommend to regularly follow the Vim mailing list 3 to see the kind of queries and answers that appear there You would be surprised to see the amount of activity and the range of flexibility of Vim that is demonstrated by all the discussion And you never know you might be able to answer a few queries too Vim en What Next 85 Two other important resources that should be good to explore are the Best of Vim Tips 4 page and the all important help user manual 5 that is an index to everything possible in Vim Make sure to refer the user manual from time to time and familiarize yourself on how to find the relevant information so that you can look up for commands as and when required Lastly if you want to know what are the latest cool features in Vim then see help new 7 Summary We have gone through a very broad overview of the range of things possible in Vim The most important thing that we have stressed on again and again is to not learn every feature possible but to make the features most useful to you a habit and to make sure to use the help to look for features as and when needed So go forth and skyrocket your editing skills to be more efficient and effective than you ever thought possible Happy Vimming Previous Next External links 1 http www swaroopch com contact 2 http www swaroopch com byteofdonate 3 http www vim org maillist php vim 4 http rayninfo
49. e Vimpress plugin 5 you can blog to your Wordpress blog right within Vim Make Firefox work like Vim Use the Vimperator add on 6 to make Firefox behave like Vim complete with modal behavior keyboard shortcuts to visit links status line tab completion and even marks support Bram s talk on the seven habits Bram Moolenaar the creator of Vim had written an article long ago titled Seven habits of effective text editing 7 that explained how you should use a good editor such as Vim Bram recently gave a talk titled Seven habits for effective text editing 2 0 8 where he goes on to describe the newer features of Vim as well as how to effectively use Vim This talk is a good listen for any regular Vim user Contribute to Vim You can contribute to Vim in various ways such as working on development of Vim itself 91 writing plugins and color schemes 10 contributing tips 11 and helping with the documentation 2 If you want to help in the development of Vim itself see help development Community Many Vim users hang out at the vim vim org mailing list 13 where questions and doubts are asked and answered The best way to learn more about Vim and to help other beginners learn Vim is to frequently read and reply to emails in this mailing list Find more articles and discussions at delicious and reddit M5 Vim en More 84 Summary We ve seen some wide range of Vim related stuff and how it can be
50. e i tolower getline i endfor Don t worry other details will be explored in later chapters A more succinct way of doing this would be to run s 1l 1 g but then again it s easier to think of the above way of doing it There is an even simpler method of selecting all the text 1GVG and using the u operator to convert to lowercase but then again that s too easy and isn t as cool as showing off the above way of making Vim do steps of actions Phew Are you convinced yet Vim en Introduction 10 In these examples you can see the power of Vim in action Any other editor would make it insanely hard to achieve the same level of functionality And yet amazingly all this power is made as understandable as possible Notice that we didn t use the mouse even once during these examples This is a good thing Count how many times you shift your hand between the keyboard and the mouse in a single day and you ll realize why it is good to avoid it when possible Don t be overwhelmed by the features here The best part of Vim is that you don t need to know all of these features to be productive with it you just need to know a few basic concepts After learning those basic concepts all the other features can be easily learned when you need them Previous Next Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Introduction amp oldid 1205 Principal Authors Swaroop Nofrak Vim en Installation L
51. e managing an entire system using just plain text Summary We have just explored how Vim can help you in creating a personal information management system for yourself It s fascinating how we don t need a complicated software for such a system just plain text files and Vim will do See Abhijit Nadgouda s article on using Vim as a personal wiki 7 for an alternative way of achieving the same using built in Vim functionality Previous Next External links 1 http www lifehack org articles lifehack wikify your life how to organize everything html 2 http www vim org scripts script php script id 171 3 http www vim org scripts script php script id 197 4 http www vim org scripts script php script id 861 5 http deplate sourceforge net Markup html 6 http www bnet com 2403 13074_23 52958 html 7 http ifacethoughts net 2008 05 02 vim as a personal wiki Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_en Personal_ Information Management amp oldid 1142 Principal Authors Swaroop Fuzzymonk Vim en Scripting Introduction If you want to customize any software most likely you will change the various settings in the software to suit your taste and needs What if you wanted to do more than that For example to check for conditions such as if GUI version then use this colorscheme else use this colorscheme This is where scripting comes in Scripting basically means using a language whe
52. e map of its chemical characteristics and 3 dimensional topography The polar regions are of special interest as they might contain ice The lunar mission carries five ISRO payloads and six payloads from other international space agencies including NASA ESA and the Bulgarian Aerospace Agency which were carried free of cost Move your cursor the Vim way The most basic keys that you should use are the hjkl keys These 4 keys correspond to the left down up and right arrow keys respectively Notice these keys are situated directly under your right hand when they are placed on the home row But why not use the arrow keys themselves The problem is that they are located in a separate location in the keyboard and it requires as much hand movement as it requires to use a mouse Remember that the right hand fingers should always be placed on jkl keys and the thumb on the space bar Now let s see how to use these 4 keys Vim en Moving Around 26 Using h j k l instead of arrow keys h You have to stretch your index finger which is on j to the left to press the h This is the left most key and signifies going left j The drooping j key signifies going down k The upward pointing k key signifies going up l The right most l key signifies going right Note that we can repeat the operation by prefixing a count For example 2j will repeat the j operation 2 times Open up the chandrayaan txt text document and start
53. e question How would I do this in the editor I currently use for each example Note Don t worry too much about the details of the Vim commands here the point here is to enlighten you with the possibilities not to start explaining how these things work That is what the rest of the book is for Edit In Vim How do you move the cursor Press 7j down by 7 lines How do you delete a word Press dw Yes a word How do you search the file Press for the current word that the cursor is currently placed on How to doa find and replace Run 50 100s old new g only in lines 50 100 What if you wanted to view Run sp to split the view two different parts of the same file simultaneously Vim en Introduction What if you wanted to open a file whose name is in the current document and the cursor is placed on that name What if you wanted to choose a better color scheme of the display What if you wanted to map the keyboard shortcut ctrl s to save the file What if you wanted to save the current set of open files as well as any settings you have changed so that you can continue editing later What if you wanted to see colors for different parts of your code What if you wanted different parts of your file to be folded so that you can concentrate on only one part at a time What if you wanted to open multiple files in tabs You use some words freguently in your document and wish there was a way that
54. e rewrite we freguently rearrange the order of the paragraphs or sentences i e we need to be able to cut copy paste the text In Vim we use a slightly different terminology desktop world vim world operation cut delete d copy yank y Vim en Editing Basics 34 paste paste p In normal desktop terminology cut ting text means removing the text and putting it into the clipboard The same operation in Vim means it deletes the text from the file buffer and stores it in a register a part of the computer s memory Since we can choose the register where we can store the text it is referred to as the delete operation Similarly in normal desktop terminology copy text means that a copy of the text is placed on the clipboard Vim does the same it yanks the text and places it in a register Paste means the same in both terminologies We have seen how you can do cut copy paste operations in Vim But how do you specify which text that these operations should work on Well we have already explored that in the previous Text Objects section Combining the operation notation and the text object notation means we have innumerable ways of manipulating the text Let s see a few examples Write this text in Vim exactly as shown This is the rthe first paragraph This is the second line This is the second paragraph Place the cursor at the topmost leftmost position by pressing 1G and that moves to the first line and the
55. editing Press the key to change the case of the character on which the cursor is positioned You will notice that Vim now marks the file having been changed for example a sign shows up in the title bar of the GUI version of Vim You can open up the actual file in another editor and check that it has not changed yet i e Vim has only changed the buffer and not yet saved it to the hard disk We can write back the buffer to the original file in the hard disk by running write Note To make saving easier add the following line to your vimrc file To save ctrl s nmap lt c s gt w lt CR gt imap lt c s gt lt Esc gt w lt CR gt a Now you can simply press ctrl s to save the file Working in my directory Vim starts up with your home directory as the default directory and all operations will be done within that directory To open files located in other directories you can use the full or relative paths such as e tmp test txt e C shopping monday txt Or you can switch Vim to that directory cd tmp cd is short for c hange d irectory To find out the current directory where Vim is looking for files pwd pwd is short for p rint w orking d irectory Cut Copy and Paste As Sean Connery says in the movie Finding Forrester Hl No thinking that comes later You must write your first draft with your heart You rewrite with your head The first key to writing is to write not to think When w
56. elp guickfix for details on how to write your own compiler plugin Homework Write a global plugin In order to exercise your newly acguired plugin writing skills here s an exercise for you to try out Write a plugin that deletes duplicate lines and deletes redundant blank lines in the document You can use either Vim s scripting language or any of the other languages that have an interface with Vim If you need inspiration see this Vim Tip M4 How about another one Write a script to fetch the meaning and related words for the current word under the cursor Again if you need inspiration see my lookup vim plugin 151 Disabling plugins Suppose you find Vim acting weirdly and suspect a plugin to be the cause then you can allow Vim to do selective initialization using the u command line argument For example vim u NONE will start up Vim without any initialization scripts being run This is pure raw Vim running Use vim u your minimal initialization vim to run only the specific initializations that you need This option is useful for debugging if any problems you are facing are present in Vim or have been introduced by a plugin etc See help u and help starting for details Vim en Plugins 70 Summary We have seen the various kinds of plugins available for Vim how to use such plugins and how to write such plugins We now have some idea of how extensible Vim is and how we can write plugins to make our li
57. epts will help you to understand all you need to know on how to use Vim Since you now understand the difference between normal mode and insert mode you can look up the various commands you can run in the normal mode and you can immediately start using them Compare that to learning new commands in traditional editors which generally means having to read a lot of documentation searching a lot of menus a lot of trial and error or plain asking someone for help Personally I find the names of the modes not intuitive to beginners I prefer calling the insert mode as writing mode and the normal mode as rewriting mode but we will stick to the standard Vim terminology to avoid confusion Note All commands in the normal mode should end with the enter key to signal Vim that we have written the full command So when we say run help vim modes intro it means you should type help vim modes intro and then press the enter key at the end of the command Vim en First Steps 15 Writing a file We have seen how to open and close files in Vim now let s do something in between which is write 1 Open Vim 2 Type edit hello txt and press the enter key 3 Press i 4 Type the text Hello World 1 No Name none 0x6 0 0 1 gt No Name none 0x9 edit hello txt 1 hello txt none 0x6e 0 1 gt INSERT Vim en First Steps 16 5 Press the lt Esc gt key 6 Type write and press the enter key
58. equires less effort Vim was designed for people who are familiar with the keyboard Why Because we spend most of our time in editing tasks which implicitly make extensive use of the keyboard and the faster we are able to type the faster we get the work done Let s start with a basic technique to get you comfortable with the keyboard Home Row Technique Place your fingers on the home row 1 of the keyboard by positioning your hands such that the fingers of your left hand are on the ASDF keys and the fingers of your right hand are on the JKL keys as shown in the drawing artist unknown 21 Getting your hands to be comfortable in this position is one of the most important steps in learning how to use the keyboard effectively The idea is that you should be able to type any key using the finger that is closest to that key and then your finger should automatically come back to its original position It might Hands on keyboard seem difficult at first but try it a couple of times and you will see that you will type much faster this way Note that most keyboards have some home row markers on the F and J keys which serves as a reminder for you on where your fingers should be placed Now try typing the alphabets A Z using the home row technique Relatedly there is also a free online typing tutorial 3 available that explains the basics of typing skills I would encourage you to try it for just ten minutes and explore
59. er to lower or from lower to upper case of the text using the key Open the dapping txt file that we created in previous chapters Use the various keys to move to the first letter of the word dapper in the second paragraph Hint Use j w Dapping means being determined about being determined and being passionate about being passionate Be a dapper Press v to start the visual mode and press ap to select a p aragraph Press to flip the case of the text If you want to cancel the selection simply press lt Esc gt Dapping means being determined about being determined and being passionate about being passionate bE A DAPPER Other text object mnemonics are aw which means a w ord a means a guoted string like this is a guoted string ab means a b lock which means anything within a pair of parentheses and so on See help object motions and help text objects for more details Summary We have seen the rich number of methods that Vim gives us to move around the text It is not important to remember each of these movements it is more important to make them a habit whenever you can especially the ones that are most relevant to you and when they become a habit they reduce the movement of your hands you become faster and ultimately spend more time on thinking about your writing rather than on the software you use to write See help various motions as well as help motion for more interesting ways of movement
60. et s see how to get Vim installed on your computer Windows If you use Microsoft Windows then the following steps will help you get the latest version of Vim 7 installed on your computer 1 Visit http www vim org download php pc 2 Download the Self installing executable gvim72 exe as of this writing 3 Double click the file and install Vim like any other Windows based software 1 Mac OS X If you use Mac OS X then you already have the terminal version of Vim installed Run the menu command Finder gt Applications gt Utilities gt Terminal In the terminal run the command vim and press enter you should now see the Vim welcome screen If you want to use a graphical version of Vim download the latest version of the Cocoa based MacVim project 2 Double click the file such as MacVim 7 2 stable 1 2 tbz it will be unarchived and a directory called MacVim 7 2 stable 1 2 will be created Open the directory and copy the MacVim app to your Applications directory For more details MacVim diffrences including how to run MacVim from the terminal see the macvim refrence 1 Click on Finder gt Applications gt MacVim 2 Type help macvim and press the Enter key Vim en Installation 11 Linux BSD If you are using a Linux or BSD system then you will have at least a minimal console version of Vim already installed Open a terminal program such as konsole or gnome terminal run vim and you should see the Vim we
61. f each word function Capitalize range for line number in range a firstline a lastline let line content getline line number Luckily the Vim manual had the solution already Refer help s amp and see Examples section let line content substitute line content w u 0 g call setline line number line content endfor endfunction How It Works The a firstline and a lastline represent the arguments to the function with correspond to the start and end of the range of lines respectively We use a for loop to process each line fetched using getline in the range Weusethe substitute function to perform a regular expression search and replace on the string Here we are specifying the function to look for words which is indicated by w which means a word i e a continuous set of characters that are part of words Once such words are found they are to be converted using u 0 the u indicates that the first character following this seguence should be converted to upper case The 0 indicates the match found by the substitute function which corresponds to the words In effect we are converting the first letter of each word to upper case Wecall the setline function to replace the line in Vim with the modified string To run this command 1 Open Vim and enter some random text such as this is a test 2 Run source capitalize vim this sources the file as if the commands were r
62. f these commands would be even more difficult Vim en First Steps 14 Let s take a specific example Suppose you want to change all occurrences of the word from to the word to in a document In a traditional editor you can run a menu command like Edit gt Replace or use a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl R and then enter the from word and the to word and then click on Replace Then check the Replace All option In Vim you simply run amp s from to g in the normal mode The s is the substitute command See how simpler this is What if you want to now run this substitution only in the first 10 lines of the text and you want to have a yes no confirmation for each replacement In traditional text editors achieving the yes no confirmation is easy by unchecking the Replace All option but notice that you have to first search for this option and then use the mouse to click on the option or use a long series of keys using the keyboard But how will you run the Replace for only the first 10 lines In Vim you can simply run 0 10s from to gc The new c option we are using means we want a c onfirmation message for every replace By separating the writing insert and command normal modes Vim makes it easy for us to switch the two contexts easily Notice how the first steps to using Vim seem a little weird a little strange but once you have seen it in action it starts to make sense The best part is that these core conc
63. fe easier Previous Next External links 1 http www vim org scripts index php 2 http dotfiles org vimrc 3 http www vi improved org vimrc php 4 http amix dk vim vimrc html 5 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1652 6 http www vim org scripts script php script id 301 7 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1242 8 http daringfireball net projects markdown 9 http orangoo com labs AmiNation AmiFormat 10 http orangoo com labs AmiNation AmiFormat online 20reference 11 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1745 12 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1439 13 http www vim org scripts script php script id 1746 14 http vim wikia com wiki Remove unwanted empty lines 15 http www vim org scripts script php script id 2001 Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Plugins amp oldid 1241 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Programmers Editor Introduction Vim tends to be heavily used by programmers The features ease of use and flexibility that Vim provides makes it a good choice for people who write a lot of code This should not seem surprising since writing code involves a lot of editing Let me reiterate that typing skills is critical for a programmer If our earlier discussion didn t convince you hope this article by Jeff Atwood on We Are Typists First Programmers Second H will convince you If
64. for completion The cool thing about this compared to omni completion is that you get to view the documentation for each of the possibilities VimPdb 19 helps you to debug Python programs from within Vim Writing your own plugins You can write your own plugins to extend Vim in any way that you want For example here s a task that you can take on Write a Vim plugin that takes the current word and opens a browser with the documentation for that particular word the word can be a function name or a class name etc If you really can t think of how to approach this take a look at Online documentation for word under cursor tip at the Vim Tips wiki 120 I have extended the same tip and made it more generic Add the following lines to your vimrc to enable online documentation Inspiration http vim wikia com wiki Online documentation for word under cursor function Browser if has win32 has win64 let s browser C Program Files Mozilla Firefox firefox exe new tab elseif has win32unix Cygwin let s browser cygdrive c Program Files Mozilla Firefox firefox exe new tab elseif has mac has macunix has unix let s browser firefox new tab endif return s browser endfunction function Run command if has win32 has win64 let s startCommand start let s endCommand elseif has mac has macunix TODO Untested on Mac let s startCommand ope
65. ghted compared to the other lines in the file But what if you don t like it Just delete the highlight_current_line vim file and restart Vim Similarly we can install our own related vim or capitalize vim from the Scripting chapter into our plugin directory and this avoids us the trouble of having to use source every time Ultimately any kind of Vim plugin that you write should end up somewhere in your vim vimfiles plugin directory Filetype plugin Filetype plugins are written to work on certain kinds of files For example programs written in the C programming language can have their own style of indentation folding syntax highlighting and even error display These plugins are not general purpose they work for these specific filetypes Using a filetype plugin Let s try a filetype plugin for XML XML is a declarative language that uses tags to describe the structure of the document itself For example if you have a text like this Iron Gods Ashok Banker s next book immediately following the Ramayana is said to be a novel tentatively titled Iron Gods scheduled to be published in 2007 A contemporary novel it is an epic hard science fiction story about a war between the gods of different faiths Weary of the constant infighting between religious sects and their deities God aka Allah Yahweh brahman or whatever one chooses to call the Supreme Deity wishes to destroy creation altogether A representation of prophets and ho
66. gueries related 5 to the current line Last Updated 2008 11 21 Fri 08 36 AM IST Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Make sure we run only once if exists loaded related finish endif let loaded related 1 Look up Yahoo Search and show results to the user function Related python lt lt EOF import vim print Length of the current line is len vim current line Vim en Scripting 56 EOF endfunction The main approach to writing plugins in interfaced languages is same as that for the built in scripting language The key difference is that we have to pass on the code that we have written in the Python language to the Python interpreter This is achieved by using the EOF as shown above all the text from the python lt lt EOF command to the subsequent EOF is passed to the Python interpreter You can test this program by opening Vim again separately and running source related vim and then run call Related This should display something like Length of the current line is 54 Now let us get down the actual functionality of the program Yahoo Search has something called a RelatedSuggestion query 1 which we can access using a web service This web service can be accessed by using a Python API provided by Yahoo Search pYsearch 2 Vim plugin for looking up popular search queries related to the current line Last Updated 2008 11 21 Fri 08
67. h usually means the entire application itself Just think of windows as views on different files Let s take the same partl txt and part2 txt sample files used in the previous section First load the part1 txt using e partl txt Now let s open a new buffer by splitting the window to create a new window run new You should now be able to do any normal editing in the new buffer in the new window except that you can t save the text because you haven t associated a file name with the buffer For that you can use w test txt to save the buffer Vim en Multiplicity How do you switch between these two windows Just use ctrl w lt motion key gt to switch between the windows Motion keys can be one of h j k l or even any of the arrow keys in this example only up and down keys make sense Remember that ctrl w operations work on w indows lis is the new test file ttt te t 22 3 test txt none 0x54 1 1 ALL I have coined a phrase for myself CUT to the G 1 Concentrate i 2 Understan As a guick shortcut you can press 3 Think tond ctrl w twice i e ctrl w ctrl w to 4 Get Things Done 1 cycle between all the open windows A particular situation where multiple windows are useful is when you want to view two different parts of the same file simultaneously Just run partl txt none sp to create a sp lit window and then you can scroll each window to a different position and continue your editi
68. he file is stored in the computer s memory and any changes you make is changed in the computer s memory and immediately displayed Once you have finished editing the file you can save the file which means that Vim writes back the text in the computer s memory to the file on the hard disk The computer memory used here to store the text temporarily is referred to as a buffer Note that this same concept is the reason why we have to save files in all editors or word processors that we use Now open up Vim write the words Hello World and save it as the file hello txt If you need to remember how to do this please refer to the First Steps chapter Swap Now you will notice that another file has been created in the same directory as this file the file would be named something like hello txt swp Run the following command to find out the exact name of the file swapname What is this file Vim maintains a backup of the buffer in a file which it saves regularly to the hard disk so that in case something goes wrong like a computer crash or even Vim crashes you have a backup of the changes you have made since you last saved the original file This file is called a swap file because Vim keeps swapping the contents of the buffer in the computer memory with the contents of this file on the hard disk See help swap file to know more details Vim en Editing Basics 33 Save my file Now that the file has been loaded let s do a minor
69. he xmledit ftplugin adds the closing tag automatically for you So your document should now look like Vim en Plugins 64 lt article gt lt article gt 6 Now type another gt and see how the tag expands so that you can enter more tags The document should now look like this lt article gt lt article gt 7 You ll notice the cursor is also indented so that you can write the document in a neatly structured way to reflect the structure of the document 8 Repeat the process until you have written the full document Notice how a special ftplugin for XML makes it much easier for you to write XML documents This is what ftplugins are usually designed for Writing a filetype plugin Let us try to write our own ftplugin In our previous example of using the xmledit vim ftplugin and writing in the XML format we Saw that we had to write some standard header information at the top for every DocBook XML file which is the specific format we used Why not make this automatic in Vim via the use of a ftplugin Our xml ftplugin basically needs to add the following information at the top of a new XML file lt xml version 1 0 gt lt DOCTYPE article PUBLIC OASIS DTD DocBook XML V4 5 EN http www oasis open org docbook xml 4 5 docbookx dtd gt So let s put our new ftplugin say called xmlheader vim to work only on BufNewFile event So add the following to your vimrc autocmd BufNewFile xml source
70. helpgrep command If you do not know what the name of the topic is then you can search the entire documentation for a phrase by using helpgrep Suppose you want to know how to look for the beginning of a word then just run helpgrep beginning of a word You can use cnext and cprev to move to the next and previous part of the documentation where that phrase occurs Use clist to see the whole list of all the occurrences of the phrase Quick help Copy the following text into a file in Vim and then also run it let amp keywordprg help Now position your cursor anywhere on the word keywordprg and just press K You ll be taken to the help immediately for that word This shortcut avoids having to type help keywordprg Online forum and IRC If you are still not able to figure out what you want to do then the next best thing is to approach other Vim users to help you out Don t worry this is actually very easy and it is amazing how other Vimmers who are willing to help you out First step is to search the Vim mailing list to see if someone has already answered your question Just go to the Vim Group search page 1 and then enter the keywords of your question Most of the times many common questions will be already answered since this is such a high traffic mailing list i e lots and lots of people ask questions and give answers in this group If you cannot find any relevant answer then you can visit the Vim IRC forum Open an IRC
71. ifferent files different windows and different tabs to help us to handle more simultaneously After all an important part about good editing is managing files Multiple Sections using Folds If you re editing a long document wouldn t it be easier if you can close all sections of the document and focus on only one at a time This is what we call folding in Vim Let us take the example where your document is structured such that each level of the text is indented one level higher such as the following piece of text Book I The Shadow of the Past Three Rings for the Elven kings under the sky Seven for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie One Ring to rule them all One Ring to find them One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie Vim en Multiplicity 40 Three is Company The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began Now far ahead the Road has gone And I must follow if I can Pursuing it with weary feet Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet And whither then I cannot say Note This text was retrieved from WikiOuote 1 After writing this text run set foldmethod indent position your cursor on the text you want to indent press zc and see how the text folds up Press zo to open
72. ile it is upto the five protagonists aided by Ganesa and a few concerned individuals including Lucifer Morningstar Ali Abu Tarab King David and his son Solomon and others to bring about peace among the myriad warring faiths The question is whether or not they can do so before the audience with God and if they can do so peacefully for pressure is mounting to wage one final War of Wars to end all war itself lt para gt lt sidebar gt lt para gt Excerpt taken from http en wikipedia org w index php title Ashok Banker oldid 86219280 under the GNU Free Documentation License lt para gt lt sidebar gt lt article gt Notice how the structure of the document is more explicit in the XML version This makes it easier for the tools to convert the XML into other kinds of formats including PDF and print versions The downside is that writing in XML is more difficult for the human who writes it So let s see how ftplugins can help a Vim user who writes XML 1 First download the xmledit ftplugin 6 and put it in your vim ftplugin directory 2 Add the following line to your vimrc autocmd BufNewFile BufRead xml source vim ftplugin xml vim Make sure to specify the correct directory as per your operating system This enables the xmledit ftplugin everytime you open a file with extension xml 3 Open Vim and edit a file called test xmL 4 Type lt article 5 Now type the ending gt and see how t
73. ine to your vim after ftplugin actionscript snippets vim Now open a new file say test as and then type pubfun and press lt tab gt and see it expanded to public function lt gt lt gt The cursor will be positioned for the function name tab to enter the return type of the function tab again to type the body of the function Vim en Programmers Editor 77 Going back to our original problem here s what I came up with exec Snippet getset private var _ st name et lt CR gt lt CR gt public function get st name et st type et lt CR gt lt CR gt lt tab gt return _ st name et lt CR gt lt CR gt lt CR gt public function set st name et value st type et lt CR gt lt CR gt lt tab gt st name et value lt CR gt lt CR gt Note All snippets for this plugin must be entered on a single line It is a technical limitation Follow the same procedure above to use this new snippet 1 Add this line to your vim after ftplugin actionscript snippets vim 2 Open a new file such as test as 3 Type getset and press lt tab gt and you will see this private var lt name gt public function get lt name gt lt type gt return lt name gt public function set lt name gt value lt type gt _ lt name gt value 4 Type color and press lt tab gt Notice that the variable name color is replaced everywhere 5 Type Number and pre
74. iner of the script regarding any problems or maybe even a note of thanks The License header is optional but highly recommended A Vim script or plugin that you write may be useful for many other people as well so you can specify a license for the script Conseguently other people can improve your work and that it will in turn benefit you as well A script may be loaded multiple times For example if you open two different files in the same Vim instance and both of them are html files then Vim opens the HTML syntax highlighting script for both of the files To avoid running the same script twice and redefining things twice we use a safeguard by checking for existence of the name loaded capitalize and closing if the script has been already loaded Now let us proceed to write the actual functionality We can define a function to perform the transformation capitalize the first letter of each word so we can call the function as Capitalize Since the function is going to work on a range we can specify that the function works on a range of lines Vim en Scripting 53 Vim global plugin for capitalizing first letter of each word in the current line Last Change 2008 11 21 Fri 08 23 AM IST Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Make sure we run only once if exists loaded capitalize finish endif let loaded capitalize 1 Capitalize the first letter o
75. ion i e the previous occurrence What if you knew only a part of the phrase or don t know the exact spelling Wouldn t it be helpful if Vim could start searching as and when you type the search phrase You can enable this by running set incsearch You can also tell Vim to ignore the case whether lower or upper case of the text that you are searching for set ignorecase Or you can use set smartcase When you have smartcase on If you are searching for step i e the text you enter is in lower case then it will search for any combination of upper and lower case text For example this will match all the following four Step Stephen stepbrother misstep If you are searching for Step i e the text you enter has an upper case then it will search for ONLY text that matches the exact case For example it will match Step and Stephen but not stepbrother or misstep Note I recommend that you put these two lines in your vimrc file explained later but see help vimrc intro for a guick introduction so that this is enabled by default Now that we have understood the basics of searching let s explore the real power of searching The first thing to note that what you provide Vim can not only be a simple phrase it can be a expression An expression allows you to specify the kinds of text to search for not just the exact text to look For example you will notice that step will take you to steps as we
76. k in the manner specified by the author or licensor but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of this book e Share Alike If you alter transform or build upon this work you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one For any reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this book Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder e Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author s moral rights 2 Attribution must be shown by linking back to http www swaroopch com notes Vim and clearly indicating that the original text can be fetched from this location 3 All the code scripts provided in this book is licensed under the 3 clause BSD License unless otherwise noted 4 Sample text used in this book has been retrieved from http en wikipedia org and http en wikiguote org under the GNU Free Documentation License 5 5 Volunteer contributions to this original book must be under this same license and the copyright must be assigned to the main author of this book 4 Something To Think About Books aren t written they re rewritten Including your own It is one of the hardest things to accept especially after the seventh rewrite hasn t guite done it Michael Crichton Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away An
77. lcome screen If you get a message like vim command not found then Vim is not installed You will have to use your system specific tools to install Vim such as aptitude in Ubuntu Debian Linux yum in Fedora Linux pkg add or port in FreeBSD etc Please consult your specific system s documentation and forums on how to install new packages If you want the graphical version install the vim gnome package or alternatively the gvim package Summary Depending on how it is installed you can run the vim command in the shell or use your operating system s menus to open a graphical version of the Vim application Now that we have Vim installed on your computer let us proceed to use it in the next chapter Previous Next External links 1 ftp ftp vim org pub vim pc gvim72 exe 2 http code google com p macvim Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Installation amp oldid 1139 Principal Authors Swaroop Nofrak Fuzzymonk Vim en First Steps 12 Vim en First Steps Starting Vim First step is of course to learn how to start Vim Graphical version Windows Click on Start gt Programs gt Vim 7 gt gVim Mac OS X Click on Finder gt Applications gt MacVim Linux BSD Click on Applications gt Accessories gt GVim Text Editor or press Alt F2 type gvim and press the enter key Terminal version Windows Click on Start gt Run type vim and press the enter ke
78. ll as step and even footstep if such a word is present What if you wanted to look for the exact word step and not when it is part of any other word Then you can search using lt step gt The lt and gt indicate the start and end positions of a word respectively Similarly what if you wanted to search for any number Searching for d will look fora digit But a number is just a group of digits together So we specify one or more digits together as d If we were looking for zero or more characters we can use the instead of the There are a variety of such magic stuff we can use in our search patterns See help pattern for details Vim en Editing Basics 39 Summary We have explored some of the basic editing commands that we will use in our everyday usage of Vim It is very important that you go through these concepts again and make them a habit It is not important to learn each and every option or nuances of these commands If you know how to use the command and know how to find out more on it based on what you need then you re a true Vimmer Now go ahead and start editing Previous Next External links 1 http www imdb com title tt0181536 Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_en Editing_ Basics amp oldid 1236 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Multiplicity Introduction In this chapter let s explore how Vim helps us work between different parts of the file d
79. ludenl start escape end escape Link syn match amiLink Image syn match amiImage HHHHHHHHUH Highlighting HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUU hi def amiItalic term italic cterm italic gui italic hi def amiBold term bold cterm bold gui bold Vim en Plugins 68 hi def link amiHeading Title hi def link amiTodo Todo hi def link amiList PreProc hi def link amiClass Statement hi def link amiCode Identifier hi def link amiEscape Comment hi def link amiLink String hi def link amiImage String HHHHHHHHUHUH Finish HHHHHHHHHHUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUHHUH Set syntax name let b current_syntax amifmt Now that the script actually works I ve uploaded it to the Vim scripts section 11 already as I wrote this Now anyone in the world can use the AmiFormat syntax highlighting in Vim To learn more about syntax highlighting scripts in Vim refer e help syntax e help usr_44 txt help group name help pattern overview help mysyntaxfile help new filetype Note If you want to redraw the screen in case the syntax file is causing the display to be improper press CTRL L Note You might have already guessed that when we have previously set the filetype Vim in turn automatically sets the syntax to the same name also Compiler plugin Compiler plugins are used for compiling programs written in different languages It is useful a
80. ly realize you have to change sentences in a previous section to support what you are writing in this section The problem is that you have to remember where you are right now so that you can come back to it later Can t Vim remember it for me This can be achieved using marks You can create a mark by pressing m followed by the name of the mark which is a single character from a zA Z For example pressing ma creates the mark called a Pressing a returns the cursor to line of the mark Pressing a will take you to the exact line and column of the mark The best part is that you can jump to this position using these marks any time thereafter See help mark motions for more details Time machine using undo redo Suppose you are rewriting a paragraph but you end up muddling up what you were trying to rewrite and you want to go back what you had written earlier This is where we can undo what we just did If we want to change back again to what we have now we can redo the changes that we have made Note that a change means some change to the text it does not take into account cursor movements and other things not directly related to the text Suppose you have the text I have coined a phrase for myself CUT to the G 1 Concentrate 2 Understand 3 Think 4 Get Things Done Step 4 is eventually what gets you moving but Steps 2 and 3 are egually important As Abraham Lincoln once said If I had eight hours to chop down a tree
81. ly warriors led by Ganesa the elephant headed Hindu deity randomly picks a sample of mortals five of whom are the main protagonists of the book an American Catholic an Indian Hindu a Pakistani Muslim a Japanese Buddhist and a Japanese Shinto follower The mortal sampling called a Palimpsest is ferried aboard a vast Dyson s Sphere artifact termed The Jewel which is built around the sun itself contains retransplanted cities and landscapes brought from multiple parallel Earths and is the size of 12 000 Earths It is also a spaceship travelling to the end of creation where the Palimpsest is to present itself before God to Vim en Plugins 62 plead clemency for all creation Meanwhile it is upto the five protagonists aided by Ganesa and a few concerned individuals including Lucifer Morningstar Ali Abu Tarab King David and his son Solomon and others to bring about peace among the myriad warring faiths The question is whether or not they can do so before the audience with God and if they can do so peacefully for pressure is mounting to wage one final War of Wars to end all war itself Excerpt taken from http en wikipedia org w index php title Ashok Banker amp oldid 86219280 under the GNU Free Documentation License It can be written in XML form specifically in DocBook XML format as lt DOCTYPE article PUBLIC OASIS DTD DocBook XML V4 5 EN http www oasis open org docbook xml 4 5 docbookx dtd g
82. me The GTD system basically consists of organizing your information into certain pages folders Collection Basket Projects List Next Actions Calendar Someday Maybe Reference Material 7 Waiting For o O PWN I created a viki to match this system by using the following method 1 First create a StartPage which is literally the start page to your personal organization system hereby referred to as simply your viki 2 Then create a list of main sections of your viki Getting Things Done Collect In Basket Project Projects List NextActions Next Actions Calendar SomedayMaybe Someday Maybe Reference Reference Material Waiting Waiting For NOW Uw Mm 4 Similarly go to as much depth as you want for example creating a Reference Career to jot down your career plans and Project TopSecret to gather thoughts on your next project and so on 5 Every time you want to jot down something use the Collect page and then process organize review and finally actually do your next physical actions 6 It takes a while to get accustomed to using this system but once you are comfortable you can achieve clarity of mind confidence that you re taking care of all the factors in your Vim en Personal Information Management A7 life and most importantly a sense of direction in knowing what are the important things in your life Notice how we ar
83. mind That s why it s so hard Now run e partl txt and then run e part2 txt Observe that you have the second file now open for editing How do you switch back to the first file In this particular case you can just run b 1 to switch to b uffer number 1 You can also run e partl txt to open the existing buffer into view You can see what buffers has been loaded and correspondingly which files are being edited by running buffers or a shorter form ls which stands for l i s t buffers Buffers will be automatically removed when you close Vim so you don t have to do anything special other than making sure you save your files However if you really want to remove a buffer for example in order to use less memory then you can use bd 1 to d elete the b uffer numbered 1 etc See help buffer list on the numerous things you can do with buffers Multiple Windows We have seen how to edit multiple files at the same time but what if we wanted to view two different files simultaneously For example you want to have two different chapters of your book open so that you can write the second chapter consistent with the wordings description given in the first chapter Or you want to copy paste some stuff from the first file to the second file In the last section we used the same view to edit multiple buffers Vim calls these views as windows This term window should not be confused with your desktop application window whic
84. n a let s endCommand elseif has unix has win32unix let s startCommand Vim en Programmers Editor 80 let s endCommand amp else echo Don t know how to handle this OS finish endif let s cmd silent s startCommand a command s endCommand echo s cmd execute s cmd endfunction function OnlineDoc if amp filetype viki Dictionary let s urlTemplate http dictionary reference com browse lt name gt elseif amp filetype perl let s urlTemplate http perldoc perl org functions lt name gt html elseif amp filetype python let s urlTemplate http www google com search q lt name gt amp domains docs python org amp sitesearch docs python or elseif amp filetype ruby let s urlTemplate http www ruby doc org core classes lt name gt html elseif amp filetype vim let s urlTemplate http vimdoc sourceforge net search php search lt name gt amp docs help endif let s wordUnderCursor expand lt cword gt let s url substitute s urlTemplate lt name gt s wordUnderCursor g call Run Browser s url endfunction noremap lt silent gt lt M d gt call OnlineDoc lt CR gt inoremap lt silent gt lt M d gt lt Esc gt call OnlineDoc lt CR gt a Access Databases You can even talk to some 10 different databases from Oracle to MySOL to PostgreSOL to Sybase to SOLite all from Vim using the
85. n Page Did_you_know 3F view archive 16 http creativecommons org licenses by sa 3 0 17 http www opensource org licenses bsd license php 18 http en wikipedia org wiki Wikipedia Text of the GNU Free Documentation License Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim amp oldid 1225 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Table of Contents Vim en Table of Contents Front Page Translations Preface Introduction Installation First Steps Modes Typing Skills Moving Around Help Editing Basics More Editing Multiplicity Personal Information Management Scripting Plugins Programmers Editor More What Next Feedback Charityware Colophon 21 Versions o 0o oom SsoN PR EB o MS cc COON OU PW DY Previous Next Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_en Table_of_ Contents amp oldid 1193 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Preface About Vim Vim is a computer program used for writing and it provides a range of features that help you write better Why Vim Let s face it it s very rare to produce your best work on the first attempt Most likely you will keep editing it frequently until it becomes good As Louis Brandeis once said There is no great writing only great rewriting Vim en Preface Making these numerous rapid changes would be a lot easier if we had a capable editor to
86. ng Since they both are windows to the same buffer changes in one window will be immediately reflected in the other window You can also use ctrl w s instead of sp To create a vertical split use vsp or ctrl w v To close a window just run g as usual Now that we have seen how to open and use multiple windows let s see how to further play around with the display e Suppose you have two split windows but want to reverse the windows so that you can focus your eyes on the bottom part or top part of your computer screen as per your preference Press ctrl w r to r otate the windows e Want to move the current window to the topmost position Press ctrl w K Want to resize a window to make it smaller or larger Run resize 10 tomakeit 10 lines long display etc Want to make the current window as big as possible so that you can concentrate on it Press ctrl w _ Think of the underscore as an indication that the other windows should be as small as possible Want to make the windows egual in height again Press ctrl w See help windows on more details on what you can do with windows Vim en Multiplicity 43 Multiple Tabs If you use Firefox you might have used the tabs feature which allows you to open multiple websites in a single Firefox window so that you can switch between them without having the headache of switching between multiple windows Well tabs work exactly the same way in Vim also Except that they are c
87. ng variable name and you are using the name repeatedly you can use a keyboard shortcut to ask Vim to auto complete and it ll figure out the rest Vim accomplishes this via ftplugins specifically the ones by the name ftplugin lt language gt complete vim such as pythoncomplete vim Let s start the example with a simple Python program def hello print hello world def helpme print help yourself After typing this program start a new line in the same file type he ENRNETTTTCYNTESYLTTYTUUTCHH HE IN and press ctrl x ctrl o which will we ee show you suggestions for the jg re autocompletion helpael hello If you get an error like E764 Option omnifunc is not set then run runtime autoload pythoncomplete vim to load the omnicompletion plugin To avoid doing this every time you can add the following line to your vimrc Omni completion 0 N P match 1 of 2 Omni completion in action autocmd FileType python runtime autoload pythoncomplete vim Vim automatically uses the first suggestion you can change to the next or previous selection using ctrl n and ctrl p respectively In case you want to abort using the omnicompletion simply press esc Refer help new omni completion for details on what languages are supported C HTML JavaScript PHP Python Ruby SOL XML as well as how to create your own omnicompletion scripts Note Vim en Programmers Editor 75 If you
88. nge is actually never retrievable using simple u again But it is possible in Vim using the earlier command You can also go forward in time later 45s which will take you later by 45 seconds Or if you want the simpler approach of going back by 5 changes undo 5 You can view the undo tree using undolist See help undolist for the explanation of the output from this command See help undo redo and help usr 32 txt for more details A powerful search engine but not a dotcom Vim has a powerful built in search engine that you can use to find exactly what you are looking for It takes a little getting used to the power it exposes so let s get started Let s come back to our familiar example I have coined a phrase for myself CUT to the G 1 Concentrate 2 Understand 3 Think 4 Get Things Done Step 4 is eventually what gets you moving but Steps 2 and 3 are egually important As Abraham Lincoln once said If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I d spend six hours sharpening my axe And to get to this stage you need to do Step 1 which boils down to one thing It s all in the mind That s why it s so hard Vim en Editing Basics 38 Suppose we want to search for the word Step In normal mode type Step lt cr gt i e Step followed by enter key This will take you to the first occurrence of those set of characters Press n to take you to the n ext occurrence and N to go in the opposite direct
89. ns that you can run such as tabdo to operate on each of the tab pages which are open and customizing the title of the tab pages help setting guitablabel etc Summary Vim provides a number of ways to edit multiple files at the same time buffers windows and tabs Using these features depends on your personal habit For example using multiple tabs may obviate the usage of multiple windows It s important to use the one which is most convenient and comfortable Previous Next Vim en Multiplicity 44 External links 1 http en wikiquote org wiki The Fellowship of the Ring Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Multiplicity amp oldid 1074 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Personal Information Management Introduction A chapter on personal information management PIM in a book on an editor software seems strange doesn t it Well there are lots of professional software that claim to do personal information management so let us explore why can t we use a plain text editor like Vim for this purpose Personal information management is about organizing all your information such as your todo lists diary entries your reference material such as important phone numbers scratchpad and so on Putting all of this in one convenient location can be extremely handy and we will explore this using Vim and a few plugins I tend to think of a PIM system is best organized as a wiki A
90. nslation please add your introduction and the language of translation here on this page similar to the list of A Byte of Python translations Swedish Mikael Jacobsson leochingkwake at gmail dot com has volunteered to translate the book to Swedish and the translation is in progress at http leochingkwake se wiki index php Byte of Vim Traditional Chinese Yeh Shin You or Yesyo has volunteered to translate the book to Traditional Chinese The translation is in progress and starts with the chapter Vim zh tw Russian Vitalij Naumov or hbvit7 has volunteered to translate the book to Russian The translation is in progress and starts with the chapter Vim ru Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Translations amp oldid 1247 Principal Authors Swaroop Yesyo Hbvit7 Leochingkwake License 89 License Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3 0 Unported http creativecommons org licenses by sa 3 0
91. nywhere a transformation is reguired from a source plain text language to a different format even if you are writing a plain text file in Markdown want to convert the text to HTML using a transformation program Let us explore the use of a compiler plugin for Python 1 Download the compiler python vim 12 directory script and put it in your vim compiler 2 Put the following line in your vimrc autocmd BufNewFile BufRead py compiler python 3 Restart Vim and open a Python file say test py and enter the following program Vim en Plugins 69 python print Hello World 4 Run make and you should see successful compilation 5 Let us intentionally introduce an error in the program by changing the spelling of print to pritn pritn Hello World Now run make and notice that the error is displayed and Vim automatically moves the cursor to the error line 6 Run clist to see the full list of errors 7 After fixing an error you can run cnext to move to the next error If you open up the compiler python vim script that we downloaded you will notice that it is very simple there are only two variables defined one is makeprg which defines how to make the file i e how to compile it and the second is errorformat which defines the form of the error output of the compiler 13 I ve written a compiler plugin for Adobe Flex using the same two variables See help write compiler plugin and h
92. o It seemed to inevitably end up on the backburner I revived writing the book in the month after foss in 41 2006 thanks to the infective spirit of the people there But yet again I couldn t sustain the momentum I started to be more productive when I started following David Allen s Getting Things Done principles 5 This led me to revive working on the book to get it finally in some shape to be released to the world on the first day of foss in 2008 About the author o Swaroop C H is 26 years of age He graduated in B E Computer Science from PESIT Bangalore India He currently works at his co founded startup IONLAB 6 He has previously worked at Yahoo and Adobe His passions are reading and writing running and cycling and some coding More about him at http Www swaroopch com about He can be contacted via http www swaroopch com contact Vim en Colophon 83 Previous Next External links 1 http www swaroopch com contact 2 http deplate sourceforge net 3 http www vim org account profile php user id 4037 4 http www foss in 5 http www swaroopch com gtdbook 6 http www ionlab in Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Colophon amp oldid 1194 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Translations If you want to learn how to create a translation please see the A Byte of Python Translation Howto If you are already in the process of creating a tra
93. o far Thanks for putting it online Anonymous 132 230 122 35 t3 Thank you Swaroop I ve begun reading it and must say it s very well written And I have no doubts this great community of us vim users here will improve it through fixes additions or small corrections the wiki format is a great idea Eduard Fabra 14 Also e The book was listed as the top tip for Dec 2008 on the Official Vim Tips wiki 151 License and Terms 1 This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3 0 Unported 16 license This means e You are free to Share i e to copy distribute and transmit this book You are free to Remix i e to adapt this book Under the following conditions Attribution You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of this book e Share Alike If you alter transform or build upon this work you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one For any reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this book Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author s moral rights Vim 2 Attribution must be shown by linking back to http www swaroopch com notes Vim and clearly indicating that the original text can be fet
94. o summarize the two new keys we just learnt Command Action o open a new line below O open a new line above Notice how the upper and lower case o commands are opposite in the direction in which they open the line Was there something wrong in the text that we just wrote Aah it should be dapper not rapper It s a single character that we have to change what s the most efficient way to make this change We could press i to switch to insert mode press lt Del gt key to delete the r typed and then press lt Esc gt to switch back to the insert mode But that is four steps for such a simple change Is there something better You can use the s key s for s ubstitute e Move the cursor to the character r or simply press b to move b ack to the start of the word e Press s Typed Press lt Esc gt to switch back to the normal mode Well okay it may not have saved us much right now but imagine repeating such a process over and over again throughout the day Making such a mundane operation as fast as possible is beneficial because it helps us focus our energies to more creative and interesting aspects As Linus Torvalds says it s not just doing things faster but because it is so fast the way you work dramatically changes Again there is a bigger version of the s key S which substitutes the whole line instead of the current character Press S Type Be a sinner Press lt Esc gt to switch back to normal mo
95. of thought Let s see a few examples of how Vim makes this fast Want to move the cursor to the next word Press w Want to move to to the next paragraph Press Want to move to the 3rd occurrence of the letter h Press 3fh Want to move 35 lines downwards Press 35j Vim en Moving Around 25 After one of the above movements want to jump back to the previous location Press ctrl o Want to learn how all these work Let s dive in First open a file called chandrayaan txt and type the following text taken from Wikipedia 1 Chandrayaan 1 is India s first mission to the moon Launched by India s national space agency the Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO The unmanned lunar exploration mission includes a lunar orbiter and an impactor The spacecraft was launched by a modified version of the PSLV XL on 22 October 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sriharikota Andhra Pradesh at 06 23 IST 00 52 UTC The vehicle was successfully inserted into lunar orbit on 8 November 2008 The Moon Impact Probe was successfully impacted at the lunar south pole at 20 31 hours on 14 November 2008 The remote sensing satellite had a mass of 1 380 kilograms 3 042 lb at launch and 675 kilograms 1 488 lb at lunar orbit and carries high resolution remote sensing equipment for visible near infrared and soft and hard X ray frequencies Over a two year period it is intended to survey the lunar surface to produce a complet
96. ollowing text in the file Bengaluru The name Bangalore is an anglicised version of the city s name in the Kannada language Bengaluru gt A popular anecdote although one contradicted by historical gt evidence recounts that the 11th century Hoysala king Veera Ballala gt II while on a hunting expedition lost his way in the forest Tired gt and hungry he came across a poor old woman who served him boiled gt beans The grateful king named the place _ benda kaal ooru gt literally town of boiled beans which was eventually gt colloguialised to Bengaluru KK This information has been retrieved from Wikipedia http en wikipedia org wiki Bangalore under the GNU Free Documentation License 4 Notice how different parts of the file such as the heading and emphasized words are automatically highlighted This should hopefully make writing in Markdown syntax easier Vim en Plugins 66 Writing a syntax scheme Let us now try to write a syntax file of our own for the AmiFormat 9 text format Syntax highlighting basically revolves around two steps first is to define the kind of text format we are looking for and the second is to describe how it is to be displayed For example suppose we want to find all instances of lt b gt any word lt b gt to be displayed in bold First we need to match such a pattern in our text and then link the name of this pattern to the kind of display needed syntax
97. ortant because the functionality of Vim can be extended in infinite ways See help eval help python commands help perl using and help ruby commands for details Previous Next External links 1 http developer yahoo com search web V1 relatedSuggestion html 2 http pysearch sourceforge net Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Scripting amp oldid 1208 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Plugins Introduction As we have seen in the previous chapter we can write scripts to extend the existing functionality of Vim to do more stuff We call these scripts which extend or add functionality as plugins There are various kinds of plugins that can be written vimrc global plugin filetype plugin Vim en Plugins 58 e syntax highlighting plugin e compiler plugin Not only can you write your own plugins but also download and use plugins written by others HH Customization using vimrc When I install a new Linux distribution or reinstall Windows the first thing I do after installing Vim is fetch my latest vimrc file from my backups and then start using Vim Why is this important Because the vimrc file contains various customizations settings I like which makes Vim more useful and comfortable for me There are two files you can create to customize Vim to your taste 1 vimrc for general customizations 2 gvimrc for GUI specific customizations These are stored as
98. re you can specify conditions and actions put together into scripts There are two approaches to scripting in Vim using the built in Vim scripting language or using a full fledged programming language such as Python or Perl which have access to the Vim internals via modules provided that Vim has been compiled with these options enabled This chapter requires some knowledge of programming If you have no prior programming experience you will still be able to understand although it might seem terse If you wish to learn programming please refer my other free book A Byte of Python Vim en Scripting 48 There are two ways of creating reusable functionality in Vim using macros and writing scripts Macros Using macros we can record sequences of commands and then replay it in different contexts For example suppose you had some text like this tansen is the singer daswant is the painter todarmal is the financial wizard abul fazl is the historian birbal is the wazir There are many things to correct here 1 Change the first letter of the sentence to upper case 2 Change is to was 3 Change the to a 4 End the sentence with in Akbar s court One way would be to use a series of substitute commands such as s w u 0 _ but this would reguire 4 substitution commands and it might not be simple if the substitute command changes parts of the text which we do not want to be changed A better way would
99. rscheme darkblue endif How It Works has isa function which is used to determine if a specified feature is supported in Vim installed on the current computer See help feature list to see what kind of features are available in Vim Theif statement checks the given condition If the condition is satisfied we take certain actions Else we take the alternative action Note that an if statement should have a matching endif There is elseif also available if you want to chain together multiple conditions and actions The looping statements for and while are also available in Vim Vim en Scripting 51 let i 0 while i lt 5 echo i let i 1 endwhile Output BWN FE Using Vim s built in functions the same can also be written as for i in range 5 echo i endfor e range isa built in function used to generate a range of numbers See help range for details The continue and break statements are also available Data Structures Vim scripting also has support for lists and dictionaries Using these you can build up complicated data structures and programs let fruits apple mango coconut echo fruits 0 apple echo len fruits LU 3 call remove fruits 0 echo fruits mango eo con call sort fruits echo fruits coconut mango for fruit in fruits echo I like fruit endfor I like coconut I like mango Vim en Scripting 52
100. ruggling to figure out which plugins to try out the book already has the basic background work already for the reader 6 Just enough info to get you to understand and use not everything required Pareto principle 7 Relatedly the book shouldn t attempt to rewrite the reference manual Where appropriate it should simply point out the relevant parts This way there is no redundancy the user learns to use the awesome built in reference manual which is important and the book can stand on its own strengths as well To summarize the mantra is Concepts Examples Pithy Status of the Book This book is a work in progress and is not yet ready to be called a 1 0 version Constructive suggestions are most welcome Please add your thoughts and suggestions via the Discussion link in the left sidebar on any page at the official website or alternatively email me l Official Website The official website of the book is http www swaroopch com notes Vim From the website you can read the whole book online or download the latest versions of the book and also send me feedback Vim en Preface License and Terms 1 This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3 0 Unported 3 license This means You are free to Share i e to copy distribute and transmit this book You are free to Remix i e to adapt this book Under the following conditions Attribution You must attribute the wor
101. s at the top of the application as well as various options accessible via the mouse but note that this is completely optional You can still access all the features of Vim using only the keyboard Why is this important Because once a person becomes efficient at typing using only the keyboard makes the person much faster and less error prone as opposed to using the mouse This is because the hand movement required to switch between the keyboard and the mouse is slow and there is a context switch required in the mind of the person when shifting the hand between the keyboard and the mouse If we make it a habit to use the keyboard as much as possible you re saving valuable hand movement Of course this is subjective Some people prefer the mouse and some prefer the keyboard I encourage you to use the keyboard as much as possible to experience the real power of Vim Introduction to Modes Imagine it s a Saturday evening and you re bored of the shows on television You want to watch an old favorite movie instead So you switch the TV to video mode so that it shows what the DVD player is displaying instead of the cable channels Note that the television is still displaying video but you switch the context on whether you want to watch a DVD ora live television channel Similarly Vim has modes For example Vim has a mode for writing text a mode for running commands etc They are all related to the main purpose of editing text but you switch
102. sed in a later chapter Try to repeat this process a few times with different file names different text etc so that you get used to the basic set of steps in using Vim Notice that when you are in insert mode Vim displays INSERT at the bottom left corner When you switch to normal mode it will not display anything This is because normal mode is the default mode in which Vim runs Take some time to soak in this information this is probably the hardest lesson there is to learn about Vim the rest is easy And don t worry help is not too far away Actually it s just a help command away For example run help edit and you ll see the documentation open up Go ahead try it Summary We have now discussed the basic concepts and usage of Vim See help notation and help keycodes also Be sure to understand these concepts well Once you start thinking in Vim understanding the rest of Vim s features is easy Previous Next Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_en First_ Steps amp oldid 1140 Principal Authors Swaroop Fuzzymonk Vim en Modes 18 Vim en Modes Introduction We had our first encounter with modes in the previous chapter Now let us explore this concept further regarding types of modes available and what we can do in each mode Types of modes There are three basic modes in Vim normal insert and visual e Normal mode is where you can run commands This is the
103. ss lt tab gt The code now looks like this private var color public function get color Number return color public function set color value Number _color value Notice how much of keystrokes we have reduced We have replaced writing around 11 lines of repetitive code by a single Vim script line We can keep adding such snippets to make coding more lazier and will help us concentrate on the real work in the software Vim en Programmers Editor 78 See help snippets emu txt for more details this help file will be available only after you install the plugin IDE Vim can be actually used as an IDE with the help of a few plugins Project plugin The Project plugin is used to create a Project manager kind of usage to Vim Download the project 10 plugin Unarchive it to your vim directory Run helptags vim doc Download Vim source code from http www vim org subversion php Run Project A sidebar will open up in the left which will act as your project window Run c backslash followed by c Give answers for the following options Name of entry say vim7 src e Directory say C repo vim7 src CD option same as directory above Filter option say h c 8 You will see the sidebar filled up with the list of files that match the filter in the specified directory 9 Use the arrow keys or j k keys to move up and down the list of files and press the enter ke
104. t Basics of Scripting Vim has a built in scripting language using which you can write your own scripts to take decisions do stuff and manipulate the text Actions How do you change the theme i e colors used by Vim Just run colorscheme desert Here I am using the desert color scheme which happens to be my favorite You can view the other schemes available by typing colorscheme and then pressing lt tab gt key to cycle through the available schemes What if you wanted to know how many characters are in the current line echo strlen getline Notice the names strlen and getline These are functions Functions are pieces of scripts already written and have been given a name so that we can use them again and again For example the getline function fetches a line and we are indicating which line by the dot which means the current line We are passing the result returned by the getline function to the strlen function which counts the number of characters in the text and then we are passing the result returned by the strlen function to the echo command which simply displays the result Notice how the information flows in this command The strlen getline is called an expression We can store the results of such expressions by using variables Variables do what the name suggests they are names pointing to values and the value can be anything i e it can vary For example we can store the length as le
105. t lt article gt lt articleinfo gt lt author gt lt firstname gt Wikipedia Contributors lt firstname gt lt author gt lt title gt Iron Gods lt title gt lt articleinfo gt lt para gt Ashok Banker s next book immediately following the Ramayana is said to be a novel tentatively titled Iron Gods scheduled to be published in 2007 A contemporary novel it is an epic hard science fiction story about a war between the gods of different faiths Weary of the constant infighting between religious sects and their deities God aka Allah Yahweh brahman or whatever one chooses to call the Supreme Deity wishes to destroy creation altogether lt para gt lt para gt A representation of prophets and holy warriors led by Ganesa the elephant headed Hindu deity randomly picks a sample of mortals five of whom are the main protagonists of the book an American Catholic an Indian Hindu a Pakistani Muslim a Japanese Buddhist and a Japanese Shinto follower The mortal sampling called a Palimpsest is ferried aboard a vast Dyson s Sphere artifact termed The Jewel which is built around the sun itself contains retransplanted cities and Vim en Plugins 63 landscapes brought from multiple parallel Earths and is the size of 12 000 Earths It is also a spaceship travelling to the end of creation where the Palimpsest is to present itself before God to plead clemency for all creation lt para gt lt para gt Meanwh
106. t to b uild the database r ecursively Py CLEAR interp gt modules reloading 9 115 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt for all subdirectories Py CLEAR interp gt sysdict 10 116 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt 4 Restart Vim and open a source EL pal HI TH getty ne 11 256 Python pystate c lt lt GLOBAL gt gt More code file 5 Run cscope show to confirm cscope in action that there is a cscope connection created 6 Run cscope find symbol foo to locate the symbol foo You can shorten this command to cs f s foo You can also Find this definition cs f g Find functions called by this function cs f d Find functions calling this function cs f c Find this text string cs f t Find this egrep pattern cs f e See help cscope suggestions for suggested usage of cscope with Vim Also the Source Code Obedience plugin is worth checking out as it provides easy shortcut keys on top of cscope ctags While we are on the subject of C programming language the c vim 6 plugin can be quite handy Vim en Programmers Editor 74 Compiling We have already seen in the previous chapter regarding make for the programs we are writing so we won t repeat it here Easy writing Omnicompletion One of the most reguested features which was added in Vim 7 is omnicompletion where the text can be auto completed based on the current context For example if you are using a lo
107. t len strlen getline echo We have len characters in this line When you run this line on the second line above in this text you will get the following output We have 46 characters in this line Notice how we can use variables in other expressions The possibilities of you can achieve with the help of these variables expressions and commands are endless Vim en Scripting 50 Vim has many types of variables available via prefixes such as for environment variables amp for options and for registers echo HOME echo amp filetype echo a See help function list for a huge list of functions available You can create your own functions as well function CurrentLineLength let len strlen getline return len endfunction Now position your cursor on any line and run the following command echo CurrentLineLength You should see a number printed Function names have to start with an upper case This is to differentiate that built in functions start with a lower case and user defined functions start with an upper case If you want to simply call a function to run but not display the contents you can use call CurrentLineLength Decisions Suppose you want to display a different color schemes based on whether Vim is running in the terminal or is running as a GUI i e you need the script to take decisions Then you can use if has gui running colorscheme desert else colo
108. t us take some sample text from help abbreviate ab breviate lt expr gt lhs rhs add abbreviation for lhs to rhs If lhs already existed it is replaced with the new rhs rhs may contain spaces See map lt expr gt for the optional lt expr gt argument Notice that there is a standard way of writing help in Vim to make it easy for us to figure out the parts that are needed for us instead of trying to understand the whole command The first line explains the syntax i e how to use this command The square brackets in ab breviate indicate that the latter part of the full name is optional The minimum you have to type is ab so that Vim recognizes the command You can also use abb or abbr or abbre and so on till the full name abbreviate Most people tend to use the shortest form possible The square brackets in lt expr gt again indicate that the expression is optional The curly brackets in lhs rhs indicate that these are placeholders for actual arguments to be supplied The names are short for left hand side and right hand side respectively Following the first line is an indented paragraph that briefly explains what this command does Vim en Help 31 Notice the second paragraph which points you to further information You can position the cursor on the text between the two pipe symbols and press ctrl to follow the link to the corresponding help topic To jump back press ctrl o The
109. the fold Personally I prefer a keyboard shortcut of using the spacebar for both opening and closing folds To do that add this to your vimrc file Basic commands are zo and zc where we can open and close the fold respectively You can use za to a lternate between opening and closing a fold respectively You can make it even easier by using the space bar in normal mode to open and close a fold nnoremap lt space gt za Folding is a huge topic on its own with more ways of folding manual marker expression and various ways of opening and closing hierarchies of folds and so on See help folding for details Multiple Buffers Suppose you wanted to edit more than one file at a time using the same Vim what do you do Remember that files are loaded into buffers in Vim Vim can also load multiple buffers at the same time So you can have multiple files open at the same time and you can keep switching between them Let s say you have two files partl txt and part2 txt part1 txt I have coined a phrase for myself CUT to the G 1 Concentrate 2 Understand 3 Think 4 Get Things Done part2 txt Step 4 is eventually what gets you moving but Steps 2 and 3 are equally Vim en Multiplicity 41 important As Abraham Lincoln once said If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I d spend six hours sharpening my axe And to get to this stage you need to do Step 1 which boils down to one thing It s all in the
110. tifier First we specify that we are defining a region of text that has a start pattern and end pattern which is very simple in our case and then link it to the pre existing Identifier class Similarly we can proceed to add definitions to other parts of the text as defined in the AmiFormat reference l19 and the final script can look something like this Vim syntax file for AmiFormat Language AmiFormat Version 1 Last Change 2006 12 28 Thu Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Reference http orangoo com labs AmiNation AmiFormat Vim en Plugins 67 HHHHHHHHUHUH Initial Checks HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUHUNH To be compatible with Vim 5 8 See help 44 12 if version lt 600 syntax clear elseif exists b current syntax Ouit when a custom syntax file was already loaded finish endif HHHHHHHHUHUH Patterns HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUHUH Emphasis syn match amiItalic lt i gt lt i gt syn match amiBold lt b gt lt b gt Todo syn keyword amiTodo TODO FIXME XXX Headings syn match amiHeading h 1 6 s pee STS VES syn match amiList s s syn match amiList s d s Classes syn match amiClass s w syn match amiClass s Code syn region amiCode excludenl start code end code HTME syn region amiEscape exc
111. to take care of themselves and their children in the long run Details on ICCF can be found in Vim by running help iccf To contribute to the development of Vim itself you can sponsor Vim development 2 by making a monetary donation and becoming a Vim registered user you get to vote on what new features will be added to Vim Previous Next External links 1 http iccf holland org 2 http www vim org sponsor faq php Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Charityware amp oldid 1049 Principal Authors Swaroop Vim en Colophon 87 Vim en Colophon About this book This is an alpha edition of the book That means it may contain incomplete sections obvious mistakes blatant lack of detail and more Please feel free to send constructive suggestions 1 Creating this book This book would have never been written without Vim 7 My life would never have been complete without Vim Thank you Bram Moolenaar and Vimmers all over the world amp Free The original content was written in Viki syntax were then strung together using the deplate command 7 Special thanks to Thomas Link 3 for patiently answering all my queries on how to use Viki Deplate The book was later converted into a wiki format Even though the book is now being edited online live I still use Vim to write and copy paste to the MediaWiki to save the text Inspiration I started writing this book in 2004 or s
112. toine de Saint Exupery Previous Next External links 1 http www vim org 2 http www swaroopch com contact 3 http creativecommons org licenses by sa 3 0 4 http www opensource org licenses bsd license php 5 http en wikipedia org wiki Wikipedia Text of the GNU Free Documentation License Vim en Preface Source http www swaroopch com mediawiki index php title Vim_ en Preface amp oldid 1138 Principal Authors Swaroop Nofrak Vim en Introduction What is Vim Vim is a computer program used for writing any kind of text whether it is your shopping list a book or software code What makes Vim special is that it is one of those few software which is both simple and powerful Simple means it is easy to get started with Simple means that it has a minimalistic interface that helps you to concentrate on your main task writing Simple means it is built around few core concepts that helps you learn deeper functionality easily Powerful means getting things done faster better and easier Powerful means making not so simple things possible Powerful does not mean it has to be complicated Powerful means following the paradigm of Minimal effort Maximal effect What can Vim do I can hear you say So it s a text editor What s the big deal anyway Well a lot Let s see some random examples to compare Vim with your current choice of editor The point of this exercise is for you to answer th
113. ugins in Python Perl Ruby and many other languages In this chapter we will look at a simple plugin using the Python programming language but we can easily use any other supported language as well As mentioned earlier if you are interested in learning the Python language you might be interested in my other free book A Byte of Python First we have to test if the support for the Python programming language is present echo has python If this returns 1 then we are good to go otherwise you might want to install Python on your machine and try again Suppose you are writing a blog post A blogger usually wants to get as many people to read his her blog as possible One of the ways people find such blog posts is by guerying a search engine So if you re going to write on a topic say C V Raman the famous Indian physicist who has won a Nobel Prize for his work on the scattering of light you might want to use important phrases that helps more people find your blog when they search for this topic For example if people are searching for c v raman they might also search for the raman effect so you may want to mention that in your blog post or article How do we find such related phrases It turns out that the solution is guite simple thanks to Yahoo Search First let us figure out how to use Python to access the current text which we will use to generate the related phrases Vim plugin for looking up popular search
114. un external filters for the text being edited For example if you have a bunch of lines that you want to sort then you can run sort this passes the current text to the sort command in the shell and then the output of that command replaces the current content of the file Jumping around There are many ways of jumping around the code Position your cursor on a filename in the code and then press gf to open the file Position your cursor on a variable name and press gd to move the local definition of the variable name gD achieves the same for the global declaration by searching from the start of the file Use to move to the next in the first column There are many similar motions see help object motions for details e See help 29 3 help 29 4 and help 29 5 for more such commands For example I will display all lines that contain they keyword under the cursor Browsing parts of the code File system Use Vex or Sex to browse the file system within Vim and subseguently open the reguired files ctags We have now seen how to achieve simple movements within the same file but what if we wanted to move between different files and have cross references between files Then we can use tags to achieve this For simple browsing of the file we can use the taglist vim plugin 1 Install the Exuberant ctags 2 program class if PyNumber_InPlace0r free newfree function Py DECREF free ste new success
115. un in Vim inline as we have done before 3 Run call Capitalize 4 The line should now read This Is A Test Running call Capitalize every time appears to be tedious so we can assign a keyboard shortcut using leaders Vim global plugin for capitalizing first letter of each word in the current line Last Change 2008 11 21 Fri 08 23 AM IST Vim en Scripting 54 Maintainer www swaroopch com contact License www opensource org licenses bsd license php Make sure we run only once if exists loaded capitalize finish endif let loaded capitalize 1 Refer help using lt Plug gt if hasmapto lt Plug gt Capitalize map lt unigue gt lt Leader gt c lt Plug gt Capitalize endif noremap lt unigue gt lt script gt lt Plug gt Capitalize lt SID gt Capitalize noremap lt SID gt Capitalize call lt SID gt Capitalize lt CR gt Capitalize the first letter of each word function s Capitalize range for line number in range a firstline a lastline let line content getline line number Luckily the Vim manual had the solution already Refer help s amp and see Examples section let line content substitute line content w u 0 g call setline line number line content endfor endfunction e We have changed the name of the function from simply Capitalize to s Capitalize this is to indicate that the function is local to the script that it is defined in and it
116. wiki is a quick way to link together various documents which are inter related but are independent in their own right Unsurprisingly the word wiki means guick in the Hawaiian language Think of a website there is a home page and there are related pages to which you see links and each page will have its own content but can also inter link to other pages Isn t this an easy way of organizing websites What if you could do the same for your own personal information See this LifeHack article titled Wikify Your Life How to Organize Everything M on some great examples on what you can do But does this really require a specialized Wiki software What if you could do the same in just plain text files using Vim Let s dive in Installing Viki Note The vimfiles directory corresponds to vim on Linux Mac C Documents and Settings lt your user name gt vimfiles on Windows and C Users lt your user name gt vimfiles on Windows Vista See help vimfiles for specific details We re going to install Viki and its related plugins 1 Download multvals vim l and store as vimfiles plugin multvals vim 2 Download genutils zip 3 and unzip this file to vimfiles 3 Download Viki zip 4 and unzip this file to vimfiles make sure all the folders and files under the Viki folder name are stored directly in the vimfiles folder Vim en Personal Information Management 45 Get Started 1 Open the GUI version of Vim 2 e test txt
117. y Mac OS X Click on Finder gt Applications gt Utilities gt Terminal type vim and press the enter key Linux BSD Click on Applications gt Accessories Terminal or press Alt F2 type konsole gnome terminal and File Edit Tools Syntax Buffers Window Help i Ga type type type type ee LED OE PET EEE RE Se help iccf lt Enter gt g lt Enter gt help lt Enter gt or lt Fl gt for on line help help version7 lt Enter gt Bl emo VIM Vi IMproved version 7 1 314 by Bram Moolenaar et al Vim is open source and freely distributable Help poor children in Uganda for information to exit for version info 0 0 1 ALL File Edit View Terminal Tabs Help Vim is open source and freely distributable type type type type help iccf lt Enter gt g lt Enter gt help lt Enter gt or lt Fl gt for on line help help version7 lt Enter gt VIM Vi IMproved version 7 1 314 by Bram Moolenaar et al Help poor children in Uganda for information to exit for version info 0 0 1 All press the enter key Then type vim and press the enter key From now onwards when we say open Vim use either of the two methods mentioned above Note When you started Vim you might have noticed that you can t immediately start typing text Don t panic all will be explained in a little while Vim en First Steps 13 Graphical or Terminal The graphical version of Vim has menu
118. y to open the file in the main window This gives you the familiar IDE kind of interface the good thing is that there are no fancy configuration files or crufty path setups in IDEs which usually have issues always The Project plugin s functionality is simple and straightforward You can use the standard fold commands to open and close the projects and their details You can also run scripts at the start and end of using a project this helps you to setup the PATH or set compiler options and so on See help project txt for more details Running code from the text 11 You can run code directly from Vim using plugins such as EvalSelection vim or simpler plugins like inc python vim 121 SCM integration If you start editing a file you can even make it automatically checked out from Perforce using the perforce plugin 13 Similarly there is a CVS SVN SVK Git integration plugin 14 More To explore more plugins to implement IDE like behavior in Vim see e Vim Tip Using vim as an IDE all in one 15 C Python Vim IDE plugins list 16 Vim en Programmers Editor 79 There are more language specific plugins that can help you do nifty things For example for Python the following plugins can be helpful SuperTab 17 allows you to call omni completion by just pressing tab and then use arrow keys to choose the option e python calltips 18 Shows a window at the bottom which gives you the list of possibilities

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