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vim_doc.txt Page 1 usr_toc.txt For Vim version 6.2. Last

1. 24 8 Entering special characters The CTRL V command is used to insert the next character literally In other words any special meaning the character has it will be ignored For example CTRL V lt Esc gt Inserts an escape character Thus you don t leave Insert mode Don t type the space after CTRL V it s only to make this easier to read On MS Windows CTRL V is used to paste text Use CTRL Q instead of CTRL V On Unix on the other hand CTRL Q does not work on some terminals because it has a special meaning You can also use the command CTRL V digits to insert a character with the decimal number digits For example the character number 127 is the lt Del gt character but not necessarily the lt Del gt key To insert lt Del gt type CTRL V 127 You can enter characters up to 255 this way When you type fewer than two digits a non digit will terminate the command To avoid the need of typing a non digit prepend one or two zeros to make three digits All the next commands insert a lt Tab gt and then a dot CTRL V 9 CTRL V 09 CTRL V 009 To enter a character in hexadecimal use an x after the CTRL V CTRL V x7 This also goes up to character 255 CTRL V xff You can use o to type a character as an octal number and two more methods allow you to type up to a 16 bit and a 32 bit number e g for a Unicode character CTRL V 0123 CTRL V u1234 CTRL V U12345678 24 9 Digraphs Some char
2. Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 41 txt Write a Vim script usr 31 Gxt Exploiting the GUI usr_toc txt 40 1 Key mapping A simple mapping was explained in section 05 3 The principle is that one sequence of key strokes is translated into another sequence of key strokes This is a simple yet powerful mechanism The simplest form is that one key is mapped to a sequence of keys Since the function keys except lt F1l gt have no predefined meaning in Vim these are a good choice to map Example map lt F2 gt GoDate lt Esc gt read date lt CR gt kJ This shows how three modes are used After going to the last line with G the o command opens a new line and starts Insert mode The text Date is inserted and lt Esc gt takes you out of insert mode Notice the use of special keys inside lt gt This is called angle bracket notation You type these as separate characters not by pressing the key itself This makes the mappings better readable and you can copy and paste the text without problems The character takes Vim to the command line The read date command reads the output from the date command and appends it below the current line The lt CR gt is required to execute the read command At this point of execution the text looks like this Date Fri Jun 15 12 54 34 CEST 2001 Now kJ moves the cursor up and joins the lines together To decide which key or keys y
3. For the adventurous edit the file feature h You can also change the source code yourself 90 2 MS Windows There are two ways to install the Vim program for Microsoft Windows You can uncompress several archives or use a self installing big archive Most users with fairly recent computers will prefer the second method For the first vim_doc txt Page 226 one you will need An archive with binaries for Vim The Vim runtime archive A program to unpack the zip files To get the Vim archives look in this file for a mirror near you this should provide the fastest download ftp ftp vim org pub vim MIRRORS Or use the home site ftp vim org if you think it s fast enough Go to the pc directory and you ll find a list of files there The version number is embedded in the file name You will want to get the most recent version We will use 61 here which is version 6 1 gvim61 exe The self installing archive This is all you need for the second method Just launch the executable and follow the prompts For the first method you must chose one of the binary archives These are available gvim61 zip The normal MS Windows GUI version gvim6lole zip The MS Windows GUI version with OLE support Uses more memory supports interfacing with other OLE applications vim6l1w32 zip 32 bit MS Windows console version For use in a Win NT 2000 XP console Does not work well on Win 95 98 vim61d32 zip 32 bit MS
4. Automatic unindent lt When you type something in curly braces the text will be indented at the start and unindented at the end The unindenting will happen after typing the since Vim can t guess what you are going to type One side effect of automatic indentation is that it helps you catch errors in your code early When you type a to finish a function only to find that the automatic indentation gives it more indent than what you expected there is probably a missing Use the command to find out which matches the you typed A missing and also cause extra indent Thus if you get more white space than you would expect check the preceding lines When you have code that is badly formatted or you inserted and deleted lines you need to re indent the lines The operator does this The simplest form is This indents the current line Like with all operators there are three ways to use it In Visual mode indents the selected lines A useful text object is a This selects the current block Thus to re indent the code code block the cursor is in a I you have really badly indented code you can re indent the whole file with gg G However don t do this in files that have been carefully indented manually The automatic indenting does a good job but in some situations you might want to overrule it SETTING INDENT STYLE Different people have different styles of indentation By default Vim
5. Professor Smith criticized Professor Johnson today to Teacher Smith criticized Professor Johnson today To change every occurrence on the line you need to add the g global flag The command s Professor Teacher g results in starting with the original line Teacher Smith criticized Teacher Johnson today Other flags include p print which causes the substitute command to print out each line it changes The c confirm flag tells substitute to ask you for confirmation before it performs each substitution Enter the following s Professor Teacher c Vim finds the first occurrence of Professor and displays the text it is about to change You get the following prompt replace with Teacher y n a q 1 E Y At this point you must enter one of the following answers y Yes make this change n No skip this match a All make this change and all remaining ones without further confirmation q Quit don t make any more changes 1 Last make this change and then quit CTRL E Scroll the text one line up CTRL Y Scroll the text one line down The from part of the substitute command is actually a pattern The same kind as used for the search command For example this command only substitutes the when it appears at the start of a line s the these If you are substituting with a from or to part that includes a slash you need to put a backslash before it A simpler way is to use another character
6. in the first column From there it searches forward for the identifier Example cursor on idx int find_entry char name gt int idx gd for idx 0 idx lt table_len idx if strcmp table idx name name 0 return idx Next chapter usr_30 txt Editing programs Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 152 usr 30 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Aug 10 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Editing programs Vim has various commands that aid in writing computer programs Compile a program and directly jump to reported errors Automatically set the indent for many languages and format comments 30 1 Compiling 20 52 Indenting C files 30 3 Automatic indenting 30 4 Other indenting 30 5 Tabs and spaces 30 6 Formatting comments Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_31 txt Exploiting the GUI usr 29 tx Moving through programs usr_toc txt 30 1 Compiling Vim has a set of so called quickfix commands They enable you to compile a program from within Vim and then go through the errors generated and fix them hopefully You can then recompile and fix any new errors that are found until finally your program compiles without any error The following command runs the program make supplying it with any argument you give and captures the results make arguments If errors were generated they are captured and the editor position
7. last line last line vim_doc txt Page 75 The command filters the current line through a filter In Unix the date command prints the current time and date date lt Enter gt replaces the current line with the output of date This is useful to add a timestamp to a file WHEN IT DOESN T WORK Starting a shell sending it text and capturing the output requires that Vim knows how the shell works exactly When you have problems with filtering check the values of these options shell specifies the program that Vim uses to execute external programs shellcmdflag argument to pass a command to the shell shellquote quote to be used around the command shellxquote quote to be used around the command and redirection shelltype kind of shell only for the Amiga shellslash use forward slashes in the command only for MS Windows and alikes shellredir string used to write the command output into a file On Unix this is hardly ever a problem because there are two kinds of shells sh like and csh like Vim checks the shell option and sets related options automatically depending on whether it sees csh somewhere in shell On MS Windows however there are many different shells and you might have to tune the options to make filtering work Check the help for the options for more information READING COMMAND OUTPUT To read the contents of the current directory into the file use this on Unix read Ils on
8. JUMPING TO CHANGES When you have disabled folding in some way it may be difficult to find the changes Use this command to jump forward to the next change IE vim_doc txt Page 59 To go the other way use c Prepended a count to jump further away REMOVING CHANGES You can move text from one window to the other This either removes differences or adds new ones Vim doesn t keep the highlighting updated in all situations To update it use this command diffupdate To remove a difference you can move the text in a highlighted block from one window to another Take the main c and main c example above Move the cursor to the left window on the line that was deleted in the other window Now type this command dp The change will be removed by putting the text of the current window in the other window dp stands for diff put You can also do it the other way around Move the cursor to the right window to the line where changed was inserted Now type this command d The change will now be removed by getting the text from the other window Since there are no changes left now Vim puts all text in a closed fold do stands for diff obtain dg would have been better but that already has a different meaning dgg deletes from the cursor until the first line For details about diff mode see vimdiff 08 8 Various The laststatus option can be used to specify when the last window has a sta
9. Then the resulting menu commands will be Normal mode x Visual mode CTRL C Operator pending mode CTRL C Insert mode CTRL O Command line mode CTRL C When in Command line mode the CTRL C will abandon the command typed so far In Visual and Operator pending mode CTRL C will stop the mode The CTRL O in Insert mode will execute the command and then return to Insert mode CTRL O only works for one command If you need to use two or more commands put them in a function and call that function Example amenu Mine Next File call lt SID gt NextFile lt CR gt function lt SID gt NextFile next 1 Code endfunction This menu entry goes to the next file in the argument list with next Then it searches for the line that starts with Code The lt SID gt before the function name is the script ID This makes the function local to the current Vim script file This avoids problems when a function with the same name is defined in another script file See lt SID gt SILENT MENUS The menu executes the keys as if you typed them For a command this means you will see the command being echoed on the command line If it s a long command the hit Enter prompt will appear That can be very annoying To avoid this make the menu silent This is done with the lt silent gt argument For example take the call to NextFile in the previous example When you use this menu you will see this on the command line ca
10. p This only works on versions of Vim that include clipboard support More about the clipboard in section 09 3 and here clipboard 04 8 Text objects If the cursor is in the middle of a word and want to delete that word you need to move back to its start before you can do dw There is a simpler way to do this daw this is some example text daw this is some text The d of daw is the delete operator aw is a text object Hint aw stands for A Word Thus daw is Delete A Word To be precize the white space after the word is also deleted the white space before the word at the end of the line Using text objects is the third way to make changes in Vim We already had operator motion and Visual mode Now we add operator text object It is very similar to operator motion but instead of operating on the text between the cursor position before and after a movement command the text object is used as a whole It doesn t matter where in the object the cursor was To change a whole sentence use cis Take this text Hello there This is an example Just some text Move to the start of the second line on is an Now use cis Hello there Just some text The cursor is in between the blanks in the first line Now you type the new sentence Another line Hello there Another line Just some text Cis consists of the c change operator and the is text object This stands for Inn
11. r patch appends the file patch at the end of the file What if you want to read the file above the first line This can be done with the line number zero This line doesn t really exist you will get an error message when using it with most commands But this command is allowed Oread patch The file patch will be put above the first line of the file WRITING A RANGE OF LINES vim_doc txt Page 73 To write a range of lines to a file the write command can be used Without a range it writes the whole file With a range only the specified lines are written write tempo This writes the lines from the cursor until the end of the file into the file tempo If this file already exists you will get an error message Vim protects you from accidentally overwriting an existing file If you know what you are doing and want to overwrite the file append write tempo CAREFUL The must follow the write command immediately without white Space Otherwise it becomes a filter command which is explained later in this chapter APPENDING TO A FILE In the first section of this chapter was explained how to collect a number of lines into a register The same can be done to collect lines in a file Write the first line with this command write collection Now move the cursor to the second line you want to collect and type this write gt gt collection The gt gt tells Vim the collection file is not to be written as a new
12. 09 2 Using the mouse 09 3 The clipboard 09 4 Select mode Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_10 txt Making big changes usr 08 txt Splitting windows usr toc v xt 09 1 Parts of the GUI You might have an icon on your desktop that starts gVim Otherwise one of these commands should do it gvim file txt vim g file txt If this doesn t work you don t have a version of Vim with GUI support You will have to install one first Vim will open a window and display file txt in it What the window looks like depends on the version of Vim It should resemble the following picture for as far as this can be shown in ASCII file txt dir VIM X lt window title File Edit Tools Syntax Buffers Window Help lt menubar aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff ggg hhh iii jjj lt toolbar aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff ggg hhh iii jjj file text S lt scrollbar V The largest space is occupied by the file text This shows the file in the same way as in a terminal With some different colors and another font perhaps THE WINDOW TITLE At the very top is the window title This is drawn by your window system Vim will set the title to show the name of the current file First comes the name of the file Then some special characters and the directory of the file in parens These special character can be present The file cannot be modified e g
13. You can open and close folds as explained above The folds will be created and deleted automatically when you edit the file More about folding by syntax in the reference manual fold syntax 28 8 Folding by expression This is similar to folding by indent but instead of using the indent of a line a user function is called to compute the fold level of a line You can use this for text where something in the text indicates which lines belong together An example is an e mail message where the quoted text is indicated by a gt before the line To fold these quotes use this set foldmethod expr set foldexpr strlen substitute substitute getline v lnum s g ge I aa a You can try it out on this text quoted text he wrote quoted text he wrote gt double quoted text I wrote gt double quoted text I wrote VvVYV Explanation for the foldexpr used in the example inside out getline v 1lnum gets the current line substitute s g removes all white space from the line substitute gt removes everything after leading gt s strlen counts the length of the string which is the number of gt s found Note that a backslash must be inserted before every space double quote and backslash for the set command If this confuses you do set foldexpr to check the actual resulting value To correct a complicated expression use the command line completion vim_do
14. goes to near the end The previous assumes that you want to move to a line in the file no matter if it s currently visible or not What if you want to move to one of the lines you can see This figure shows the three commands you can use H gt text sample text sample text text sample text sample text M gt text sample text sample text text sample text sample text L gt text sample text vim_doc txt Page 19 Hints H stands for Home M for Middle and L for Last 03 6 Telling where you are To see where you are ina file there are three ways 1 Use the CTRL G command You get a message like this assuming the ruler option is off usr _03 txt line 233 of 650 35 col 45 52 This shows the name of the file you are editing the line number where the cursor is the total number of lines the percentage of the way through the file and the column of the cursor Sometimes you will see a split column number For example col 2 9 This indicates that the cursor is positioned on the second character but because character one is a tab occupying eight spaces worth of columns the screen column is 9 2 Set the number option This will display a line number in front of every line set number To switch this off again set nonumber Since number is a boolean option prepending no to its name has the effect of switching it off A boolean option has only these two values it is
15. here The essential thing is that a filetype plugin should only have an effect on the current buffer DISABLING If you are writing a filetype plugin to be used by many people they need a chance to disable loading it Put this at the top of the plugin Only do this when not done yet for this buffer if exists b did_ttplugin finish endif let bdid ftplugin 1 This also needs to be used to avoid that the same plugin is executed twice for the same buffer happens when using an edit command without arguments Now users can disable loading the default plugin completely by making a filetype plugin with only this line let bedid_ftplugin 1 This does require that the filetype plugin directory comes before VIMRUNTIME in runtimepath If you do want to use the default plugin but overrule one of the settings you can write the different setting in a script setlocal textwidth 70 Now write this in the after directory so that it gets sourced after the distributed vim vim ftplugin after directory For Unix this would be vim after ftplugin vim vim Note that the default plugin will have set b did_ ftplugin but it is ignored here OPTIONS To make sure the filetype plugin only affects the current buffer use the setlocal command to set options And only set options which are local to a buffer see the help for the option to check that When using setlocal for global options or options local to a window the v
16. look for proto inits h starting in the directory of the file Without the thus proto Vim would look in the proto directory below the current directory And the current directory might not be where the file that you are editing is located The path option allows specifying the directories where to search for files in many more ways See the help on the path option The isfname option is used to decide which characters are included in the file name and which ones are not e g the character in the example above When you know the file name but it s not to be found in the file you can type it vim_doc txt Page 102 Elna inite hb Vim will then use the path option to try and locate the file This is the same as the edit command except for the use of path To open the found file in a new window use CTRL W f instead of gf or use sfind instead of find A nice way to directly start Vim to edit a file somewhere in the path vam find etdido h This finds the file stdio h in your value of path The quotes are necessary to have one argument c 22 4 The buffer list The Vim editor uses the term buffer to describe a file being edited Actually a buffer is a copy of the file that you edit When you finish changing the buffer you write the contents of the buffer to the file Buffers not only contain file contents but also all the marks settings and other stuff that goes with
17. lt Enter gt key all commands that start with a colon are finished this way Now if you type the i command Vim will display INSERT at the bottom of the window This indicates you are in Insert mode A very intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle INSERT If you press lt Esc gt to go back to Normal mode the last line will be made blank GETTING OUT OF TROUBLE One of the problems for Vim novices is mode confusion which is caused by forgetting which mode you are in or by accidentally typing a command that switches modes To get back to Normal mode no matter what mode you are in press the lt Esc gt key Sometimes you have to press it twice If Vim beeps back at you you already are in Normal mode 02 3 Moving around After you return to Normal mode you can move around by using these keys h left hjkl j down k up 1 right At first it may appear that these commands were chosen at random After all who ever heard of using 1 for right But actually there is a very good reason for these choices Moving the cursor is the most common thing you do in an editor and these keys are on the home row of your right hand In other words these commands are placed where you can type them the fastest especially when you type with ten fingers vim_doc txt Page 11 You can also move the cursor by using the arrow keys If you do however you greatly slow down your editing because to pr
18. which is added to the end of each line Starting with the same text again and typing Cnew text lt Esc gt you get This is a new text short Any other new text Notice that even though only the long word was selected the text after it is deleted as well Thus only the location of the left edge of the visual block really matters Again short lines that do not reach into the block are excluded Other commands that change the characters in the block swap case a gt A and A gt a U make uppercase a gt A and A gt A u make lowercase a gt a and A gt a FILLING WITH A CHARACTER To fill the whole block with one character use the r command Again starting with the same example text from above and then typing rx This is a xxxx line short Any other xxxx line Note If you want to include characters beyond the end of the line in the block check out the virtualedit feature in chapter 25 SHIFTING The command gt shifts the selected text to the right one shift amount inserting whitespace The starting point for this shift is the left edge of the visual block vim_doc txt Page 72 With the same example again gt gives this result This is a long line short Any other long line The shift amount is specified with the shiftwidth option To change it to use 4 spaces set shiftwidth 4 The lt command removes one shift amount of whitespace at the left edge of the block This
19. with it Example execute normal normal commands The variable normal_commands must contain the Normal mode commands Make sure that the argument for normal is a complete command Otherwise Vim will run into the end of the argument and abort the command For example if you start Insert mode you must leave Insert mode as well This works execute normal Inew text lt Esc gt This inserts new text in the current line Notice the use of the special key lt Esc gt This avoids having to enter a real lt Esc gt character in your script 41 6 Using functions Vim defines many functions and provides a large amount of functionality that way A few examples will be given in this section You can find the whole list here functions A function is called with the call command The parameters are passed in between braces separated by commas Example call search Date W This calls the search function with arguments Date and W The search function uses its first argument as a search pattern and the second one as flags The W flag means the search doesn t wrap around the end of the file A function can be called in an expression Example let line getline vim_doc txt Page 181 let repl substitute line a g call setline repl The getline function obtains a line from the current file Its argument is a specification of the line number In this case
20. 6 0 Version 6 1 has the value 601 This is very useful to write a script that works with multiple versions of Vim v version The logic operators work both for numbers and strings When comparing two strings the mathematical difference is used This compares byte values which may not be right for some languages When comparing a string with a number the string is first converted to a number This is a bit tricky because when a string doesn t look like a number the number zero is used Example if 0 one echo yes endif This will echo yes because one doesn t look like a number thus it is converted to the number zero For strings there are two more items b matches with a a b does not match with The left item a is used as a string The right item b is used as a pattern like what s used for searching Example i1f str s echo str contains a space elseif str echo str ends in a full stop endif Notice the use of a single quote string for the pattern This is useful because backslashes need to be doubled in a double quote string and patterns tend to contain many backslashes The ignorecase option is used when comparing strings When you don t want that append to match case and to ignore case Thus compares two strings to be equal while ignoring case And checks if a pattern pees match also checking the case of letters For the full table see expr
21. C Wsw tag lt C R gt lt CR gt Move the cursor to the line that contains the function you want to go to Now press lt Enter gt Vim will go to the other window and jump to the selected function RELATED ITEMS You can set ignorecase to make case in tag names be ignored The tagbsearch option tells if the tags file is sorted or not The default is to assume a sorted tags file which makes a tags search a lot faster but doesn t work if the tags file isn t sorted The taglength option can be used to tell Vim the number of significant characters ina tag When you use the SNiFF program you can use the Vim interface to it sniff SNiFF is a commercial program Cscope is a free program I does not only find places where an identifier is declared but also where it is used See cscope 29 2 The preview window When you edit code that contains a function call you need to use the correct arguments To know what values to pass you can look at how the function is defined The tags mechanism works very well for this Preferably the definition is displayed in another window For this the preview window can be used To open a preview window to display the function write char ptag write char Vim will open a window and jumps to the tag write char Then it takes you back to the original position Thus you can continue typing without the need to use a CTRL W command If the name of a function appears in the text you ca
22. COMPLETING SPECIFIC ITEMS If you know what you are looking for you can use these commands to complete with a certain type of item CTRL X CTRL F file names CTRL X CTRL L whole lines CTRL X CTRL D macro definitions also in included files CTRL X CTRL I current and included files CTRL X CTRL K words from a dictionary CTRL X CTRL T words from a thesaurus CTRL X CTRL tags CTRL X CTRL V Vim command line After each of them CTRL N can be used to find the next match CTRL P to find the previous match More information for each of these commands here ins completion COMPLETING FILE NAMES Let s take CTRL X CTRL F as an example This will find file names It scans the current directory for files and displays each one that matches the word in front of the cursor Suppose for example that you have the following files in the current directory main c sub _count c sub _done c sub exit c Now enter Insert mode and start typing The exit code is in the file sub At this point you enter the command CTRL X CTRL F Vim now completes the current word sub by looking at the files in the current directory The first match is sub _count c This is not the one you want so you match the next file by typing CTRL N This match is sub_done c Typing CTRL N again takes you to sub _exit c The results The exit code is in the file sub exit c vim_doc txt Page 112 If the file name starts with Unix or C MS Windows you
23. CTRL W w pwd home Bram VeryLongFileName So long as no lcd command has been used all windows share the same current directory Doing a cd command in one window will also change the current directory of the other window For a window where lcd has been used a different current directory is remembered Using cd or lcd in other windows will not change it When using a cd command in a window that uses a different current directory it will go back to using the shared directory 22 3 Finding a file You are editing a C program that contains this line include inits h You want to see what is in that inits h file Move the cursor on the name of the file and type Gf Vim will find the file and edit it What if the file is not in the current directory Vim will use the path option to find the file This option is a list of directory names where to look for your file Suppose you have your include files located in c prog include This command will add it to the path option set patht c prog include This directory is an absolute path No matter where you are it will be the same place What if you have located files in a subdirectory below where the file is Then you can specify a relative path name This starts with a dot set patht proto This tells Vim to look in the directory proto below the directory where the file in which you use gf is Thus using gf on inits h will make Vim
24. Display the match for a search pattern when halfway typing it map Q gq vim_doc txt Page 35 This defines a key mapping More about that in the next section This defines the Q command to do formatting with the gq operator This is how it worked before Vim 5 0 Otherwise the Q command starts Ex mode but you will not need it vnoremap p lt Esc gt let current reg lt CR gt gvs lt C R gt current_reg lt CR gt lt Esc gt This is a complicated mapping It will not be explained how it works here What it does is to make p in Visual mode overwrite the selected text with the previously yanked text You can see that mappings can be used to do quite complicated things Still it is just a sequence of commands that are executed like you typed them if amp t_Co gt 2 has gui_running syntax on set hlsearch endif This switches on syntax highlighting but only if colors are available And the hlsearch option tells Vim to highlight matches with the last used search pattern The if command is very useful to set options only when some condition is met More about that in usr 41 txt vimrc filetype filetype plugin indent on This switches on three very clever mechanisms 1 Filetype detection Whenever you start editing a file Vim will try to figure out what kind of file this is When you edit main c Vim will see the c extension and recognize this as a c filetype When you edit a file that starts with bi
25. Fortunately CTRL F is Forward and CTRL B is Backward that s easy to remember A common issue is that after moving down many lines with j your cursor is at the bottom of the screen You would like to see the context of the line with the cursor That s done with the zz command some text some text some text some text some text some text some text ZZ gt line with cursor some text some text some text some text line with cursor some text The zt command puts the cursor line at the top zb at the bottom There are a few more scrolling commands see Q sc To always keep a few lines of context around the cursor use the scrolloff option 03 8 Simple searches To search for a string use the string command To find the word include for example use the command include You will notice that when you type the the cursor jumps to the last line of the Vim window like with colon commands That is where you type the word You can press the backspace key backarrow or lt BS gt to make corrections Use the lt Left gt and lt Right gt cursor keys when necessary Pressing lt Enter gt executes the command The characters S have special meaning If you want to use them in a search you must put a in front of them See below To find the next occurrence of the same string use the n command Use this to find the first include after the cursor include And then typ
26. MORE LOOPING The while command was already mentioned Two more statements can be used in between the while and the endwhile continue Jump back to the start of the while loop the loop continues break Jump forward to the endwhile the loop is discontinued Example vim_doc txt Page 180 while counter lt 40 call do_something if skip flag continue endif if finished flag break endif sleep 50m endwhile The sleep command makes Vim take a nap The 50m specifies fifty milliseconds Another example is sleep 4 which sleeps for four seconds 41 5 Executing an expression So far the commands in the script were executed by Vim directly The sexecute command allows executing the result of an expression This is a very powerful way to build commands and execute them An example is to jump to a tag which is contained in a variable execute tag tag _name The is used to concatenate the string tag with the value of variable tag name Suppose tag name has the value get_cmd then the command that will be executed is tag get_cmd The execute command can only execute colon commands The normal command executes Normal mode commands However its argument is not an expression but the literal command characters Example normal gg G This jumps to the first line and formats all lines with the operator To make normal work with an expression combine execute
27. Matches Consider defining something a bit more complex You want to match ordinary identifiers To do this you define a match syntax item This one matches any word consisting of only lowercase letters Syntax match xIdentifier lt 1 gt vim_doc txt Page 209 Keywords overrule any other syntax item Thus the keywords if then etc will be keywords as defined with the syntax keyword commands above even though they also match the pattern for xIdentifier The part at the end is a pattern like it s used for searching The is used to surround the pattern like how it s done in a substitute command You can use any other character like a plus or a quote Now define a match for a comment In the x language it is anything from to the end of a line syntax match xComment Since you can use any search pattern you can highlight very complex things with a match item See pattern for help on search patterns 44 4 Regions In the example x language strings are enclosed in double quotation marks To highlight strings you define a region You need a region start double quote and a region end double quote The definition is as follows Syntax region xString start end The Start and end directives define the patterns used to find the start and end of the region But what about strings that look like this A string with a double quote in it This creates a problem The
28. Plug gt is a special code that a typed key will never produce To make it very unlikely that other plugins use the same sequence of characters use this structure lt Plug gt scriptname mapname In our example the scriptname is Typecorr and the mapname is Add This results in lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd Only the first character of scriptname and mapname is uppercase so that we can see where mapname starts 25 1D gt is the script ID a unique identifier for a script Internally Vim translates lt SID gt to lt SNR5123_ where 123 can be any number Thus a function lt SID gt Add will have a name lt SNR gt 11_Add in one script and lt SNR gt 22 Add in another You can see this if you use the function command to get a list of functions The translation of lt SID gt in mappings is exactly the same that s how you can call a script local function from a mapping USER COMMAND Now let s add a user command to add a correction 38 if exists Correct 39 command nargs 1 Correct call s Add lt q args gt 0 40 endif The user command is defined only if no command with the same name already exists Otherwise we would get an error here Overriding the existing user command with command is not a good idea this would probably make the user wonder why the command he defined himself doesn t work command SCRIPT VARIABLES When a variable starts with s it is a script variable It can only be used vi
29. Sometimes you only know part of the name of a function Or you have many tags that start with the same string but end differently Then you can tell Vim to use a pattern to find the tag Suppose you want to jump to a tag that contains block First type this tag block Now use command line completion press lt Tab gt Vim will find all tags that contain block and use the first match The before a tag name tells Vim that what follows is not a literal tag vim_doc txt Page 146 name but a pattern You can use all the items for search patterns here For example suppose you want to select a tag that starts with write _ tselect write_ The specifies that the tag starts with write Otherwise it would also be found halfway a tag name Similarly at the end makes sure the pattern matches until the end of a tag A TAGS BROWSER Since CTRL takes you to the definition of the identifier under the cursor you can use a list of identifier names as a table of contents Here is an example First create a list of identifiers this requires Exuberant ctags ctags c types f f functions c Now start Vim without a file and edit this file in Vim in a vertically split window vim vsplit functions The window contains a list of all the functions There is some more stuff but you can ignore that Do set ts 99 to clean it up a bit In this window define a mapping mmap lt buffer gt lt CR gt Oye lt
30. This defines the same digraph rdigraph a 228 More information about digraphs here digraphs Another way to insert special characters is with a keymap More about that here 45 5 24 10 Normal mode commands Insert mode offers a limited number of commands In Normal mode you have many more When you want to use one you usually leave Insert mode with lt Esc gt execute the Normal mode command and re enter Insert mode with i or a There is a quicker way With CTRL O command you can execute any Normal mode command from Insert mode For example to delete from the cursor to the end of the line CIELO D You can execute only one Normal mode command this way But you can specify a register or a count A more complicated example CTRL O g3dw This deletes up to the third word into register g Next chapter usr_25 txt Editing formatted text Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 117 usr 25 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 12 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Editing formatted text Text hardly ever comes in one sentence per line This chapter is about breaking sentences to make them fit on a page and other formatting Vim also has useful features for editing single line paragraphs and tables 25152 Breaking lines 25 2 Aligning text 2573 Indents and tabs 25 4 Dealing with long lines 25 5 Editing tables Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents us
31. This is useful when you are duplicating a previous line For example you have this line of C code b array i gt s_mext a_array i ss_next Now you need to type the same line but with Ss prev instead of Ss next Start the new line and press CTRL Y 14 times until you are at the n of next b array i l gt s_next a_array i gt s_next b_array i gt s_ Now you type prev b_array i gt s_next a array i s next b array 1 gt 6_prey Il vim_doc txt Page 113 Continue pressing CTRL Y until the following next b array i gt s_next a_array i gt s_next b_array i gt s_prev a_array i gt s_ Now type prev to finish it off The CTRL E command acts like CTRL Y except it inserts the character below the cursor 24 6 Inserting a register The command CTRL R register inserts the contents of the register This is useful to avoid having to type a long word For example you need to type this r VeryLongFunction a VeryLongFunction b VeryLongFunction c The function name is defined in a different file Edit that file and move the cursor on top of the function name there and yank it into register v yyiw y is the register specification yiw is yank inner word Now edit the file where the new line is to be inserted and type the first letters r Now use CTRL R v to insert the function name r VeryLongFunction You continue to type the characters in betwe
32. Typing command line commands quickly Go 20 20 5 20 20 20 OP WNH away ahs al 2l Baki 21 Zs 2i Finding 22 22 22 22 L s2 23 4 Editing PER PAE Zhe VAC 23 s OWNER Command line editing Command line abbreviations Command line completion Command line history Command line window and come back Suspend and resume Executing shell commands Remembering information viminfo Sessions Views Modelines the file to edit The file explorer The current directory Finding a file The buffer list other files DOS Mac and Unix files Files on the internet Encryption Binary files Compressed files Inserting quickly 24 1 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 FPoOmANYIAHAU PWN Editing 2515 25a 25a 25 254 Making corrections Showing matches Completion Repeating an insert Copying from another line Inserting a register Abbreviations Entering special characters Digraphs 0 Normal mode commands formatted text Breaking lines Aligning text Indents and tabs Dealing with long lines Editing tables Page 3 vim_doc txt usr_26 txt Repeating 26 21 Repeating with Visual mode 26 62 Add and subtract 26 3 Making a change in many files 26 4 Using Vim from a shell script usr_27 txt Search commands and patterns 2T Ignoring case 27 2 Wrapping around the file end pA iene Offsets 27 4 Matching multiple times 2725 Alternatives 276 Character ranges 27T Chara
33. Vim and want to install another here is what to do vim_doc txt Page 227 UNIX When you type make install the runtime files will be copied to a directory which is specific for this version Thus they will not overwrite a previous version This makes it possible to use two or more versions next to each other The executable vim will overwrite an older version If you don t care about keeping the old version running make install will work fine You can delete the old runtime files manually Just delete the directory with the version number in it and all files below it Example rm rf usr local share vim vim58 There are normally no changed files below this directory If you did change the filetype vim file for example you better merge the changes into the new version before deleting it If you are careful and want to try out the new version for a while before switching to it install the new version under another name You need to specify a configure argument For example configure with vim name vim6 Before running make install you could use make n install to check that no valuable existing files are overwritten When you finally decide to switch to the new version all you need to do is to rename the binary to vim For example mv usr local bin vim6 usr local bin vim MS WINDOWS Upgrading is mostly equal to installing a new version Just unpack the files in the same place as the previous
34. When using blockwise selection you have four corners o only takes you to one of the other corners diagonally Use O to move to the other corner in the same line Note that o and O in Visual mode work very different from Normal mode where they open a new line below or above the cursor 04 5 Moving text When you delete something with the d x or another command the text is saved You can paste it back by using the p command The Vim name for this is put Take a look at how this works First you will delete an entire line by putting the cursor on the line you want to delete and typing dd Now you move the cursor to where you want to put the line and use the p put command The line is inserted on the line below the cursor a line a line a line line 2 dd line 3 p line 3 line 3 line 2 Because you deleted an entire line the p command placed the text line below the cursor If you delete part of a line a word for instance the p command puts it just after the cursor Some more boring try text to out commands 2 5 dw Some more boring text to out commands vim_doc txt Page 29 Some more boring text to try out commands MORE ON PUTTING The P command puts text like p but before the cursor When you deleted a whole line with dd P will put it back above the cursor When you deleted a word with dw P will put it back just before the cursor You can repeat putting as many times as yo
35. a double quote inside the string put a backslash in front of it let name peter echo name peter To avoid the need for a backslash you can use a string in single quotes let name peter echo name peter vim_doc txt Page 177 Inside a single quote string all the characters are taken literally The drawback is that it s impossible to include a single quote A backslash is taken literally as well thus you can t use it to change the meaning of the character after it In double quote strings it is possible to use special characters Here are a few useful ones t lt Tab gt n lt NL gt line break xr lt CR gt lt Enter gt e lt Esc gt b lt BS gt backspace backslash lt Esc gt lt Esc gt lt C W gt CTRL W The last two are just examples The lt name gt form can be used to include the special key name See expr quote for the full list of special items in a string 41 3 Expressions Vim has a rich yet simple way to handle expressions You can read the definition here expression syntax Here we will show the most common items The numbers strings and variables mentioned above are expressions by themselves Thus everywhere an expression is expected you can use a number string or variable Other basic items in an expression are SNAME environment variable amp name option r register Examples echo The value of tabstop is amp ts echo Yo
36. a function is used for the global variable count and count is another variable local to the function You now use the return statement to return the smallest number to the user Finally you end the function return smaller endfunction The complete function definition is as follows function Min numl1 num2 if a numl lt a num2 let smaller a numl else let smaller a num2 endif return smaller endfunction A user defined function is called in exactly the same way as a builtin function Only the name is different The Min function can be used like this vim_doc txt Page 184 echo Min 5 8 Only now will the function be executed and the lines be interpreted by Vim If there are mistakes like using an undefined variable or function you will now get an error message When defining the function these errors are not detected When a function reaches endfunction or return is used without an argument the function returns zero To redefine a function that already exists use the for the function command function Min numl num2 num3 USING A RANGE The call command can be given a line range This can have one of two meanings When a function has been defined with the range keyword it will take care of the line range itself The function will be passed the variables a firstline and a lastline These will have the line numbers from the range the function was called with Example f
37. a help file The file contains changes The file is read only The file is read only contains changes anyway If nothing is shown you have an ordinary unchanged file THE MENUBAR vim_doc txt Page 62 You know how menus work right Vim has the usual items plus a few more Browse them to get an idea of what you can use them for A relevant submenu is Edit Global Settings You will find these entries Toggle Toolbar make the toolbar appear disappear Toggle Bottom Scrollbar make a scrollbar appear disappear at the bottom Toggle Left Scrollbar make a scrollbar appear disappear at the left Toggle Right Scrollbar make a scrollbar appear disappear at the right On most systems you can tear off the menus Select the top item of the menu the one that looks like a dashed line You will get a separate window with the items of the menu It will hang around until you close the window THE TOOLBAR This contains icons for the most often used actions Hopefully the icons are self explanatory There are tooltips to get an extra hint move the mouse pointer to the icon without clicking and don t move it for a second The Edit Global Settings Toggle Toolbar menu item can be used to make the toolbar disappear If you never want a toolbar use this command in your vimre file set guioptions T This removes the T flag from the guioptions option Other parts of the GUI can also be enabled or disabled with this option See the help fo
38. a help file The option window Often used options yntax highlighting Switching it on No or wrong colors Different colors With colors or without colors Printing with colors Further reading more than one file Edit another file A list of files Jumping from file to file Backup files Copy text between files Viewing a file Changing the file name windows Split a window Split a window on another file Window size Vertical splits Moving windows Commands for all windows Viewing differences with vimdiff Various GUI Parts of the GUI Using the mouse The clipboard Select mode Making big changes I0 10 IO TO LO OP WNP Record and playback commands Substitution Command ranges The global command Visual block mode Page 2 vim_doc txt usr_11 txt lust 12 txt 10 6 Reading and writing part of a file 10 7 Formatting text 10 8 Changing case 10 9 Using an external program Recovering from a crash i lea a l Basic recovery 11 2 Where is the swap file I3 Crashed or not 11 4 Further reading Clever tricks T241 Replace a word 12 2 Change Last First to First Last 12 3 Sort a list 12 4 Reverse line order T235 Count words T26 Find a man page UD Trim blanks 12 8 Find where a word is used Editing Effectively Subjects that can be read independently lust 20 txt usr 21 txt use 22 6x6 jusr_ 23 txt jusr_24 txt jusr_25 txt
39. a little catch with comments for some commands Examples abbrev dev development shorthand map lt F3 gt ofinclude insert include execute cmd ao 1E stle list C files The abbreviation dev will be expanded to development shorthand The mapping of lt F3 gt will actually be the whole line after the o including the insert include The execute command will give an error The command will send everything after it to the shell causing an error for an unmatched character There can be no comment after map abbreviate execute and I commands there are a few more commands with this restriction For the map abbreviate and execute commands there is a trick abbrev dev development shorthand map lt F3 gt o include insert include execute cmd ae ae With the character the command is separated from the next one And that next command is only a comment Notice that there is no white space before the in the abbreviation and mapping For these commands any character until the end of line or is included As a consequence of this behavior you don t always see that trailing whitespace is included map lt F4 gt ofinclude To avoid these problems you can set the list option when editing vimre files PITFALLS Even bigger problem arises in the following example map ab o finclude unmap ab Here the unmap command will not work because it tries to u
40. and tabs at the end of a line useless wasteful and ugly To remove whitespace at the end of every line execute the following command 68 s The line range is used thus this works on the whole file The pattern that the substitute command matches with is s This finds white space characters s 1 or more of them before the end of line vim_doc txt Page 85 Later will be explained how you write patterns like this usr 27 txt The to part of the substitute command is empty Thus it replaces with nothing effectively deleting the matched white space Another wasteful use of spaces is placing them before a Tab Often these can be deleted without changing the amount of white space But not always Therefore you can best do this manually Use this search command You cannot see it but there is a space before a tab in this command Thus it s lt Space gt lt Tab gt Now use x to delete the space and check that the amount of white space doesn t change You might have to insert a Tab if it does change Type n to find the next match Repeat this until no more matches can be found 12 8 Find where a word is used If you are a UNIX user you can use a combination of Vim and the grep command to edit all the files that contain a given word This is extremely useful if you are working on a program and want to view or edit all the files that contain a specific variable For example sup
41. be undone SPECIAL CHARACTERS The map command can be followed by another command A character separates the two commands This also means that a character can t be used inside a map command To include one use lt Bar gt five characters Example map lt F8 gt write lt Bar gt checkin lt CR gt The same problem applies to the unmap command with the addition that you have to watch out for trailing white space These two commands are different unmap a unmap b unmap a unmap b The first command tries to unmap a with a trailing space vim_doc txt Page 168 When using a space inside a mapping use lt Space gt seven characters map lt Space gt W This makes the spacebar move a blank separated word forward It is not possible to put a comment after a mapping because the character is considered to be part of the mapping MAPPINGS AND ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations are a lot like Insert mode mappings The arguments are handled in the same way The main difference is the way they are triggered An abbreviation is triggered by typing a non word character after the word A mapping is triggered when typing the last character Another difference is that the characters you type for an abbreviation are inserted in the text while you type them When the abbreviation is triggered these characters are deleted and replaced by what the abbreviation produces When typing the characters for a mapping nothing is ins
42. by empty lines Also the part before the cursor If you have your paragraphs separated by empty lines you can format the whole file by typing this gggqG gg to move to the first line gqG to format until the last line Warning If your paragraphs are not properly separated they will be joined together A common mistake is to have a line with a space or Tab That s a blank line but not an empty line Vim is able format more than just plain text See fo table for how to change this See the joinspaces option to change the number of spaces used after a full stop It is possible to use an external program for formatting This is useful if your text can t be properly formatted with Vim s builtin command See the formatprg option 25 2 Aligning text To center a range of lines use the following command range center width range is the usual command line range width is an optional line width to use for centering If width is not specified it defaults to the value of textwidth If textwidth is 0 the default is 80 For example 1 5 center 40 results in the following I taught for a while One time I was stopped by the vim_doc txt Page 119 Fort Worth police because my homework was too hard True story RIGHT ALIGNMENT Similarly the right command right justifies the text ti 5right 37 gives this result I taught for a while One time I was stopped by the Fort Worth po
43. c two c file three c three c file one c one c Clearly the last one should be at the top and the type this command CTRL W K This uses the uppercase letter K the very top When you have vertical splits layout Go to that window using CTRL W w What happens is that the window is moved to You will notice that K is again used for moving upwards CTRL top and make it occupy the full with of the Vim window W K will move the current window to the If this is your i7 two c three c one c i ene TEPEE EER pee ome Then using CTRL W K in the middle window three c will result in three c Enee two c one c Ewo soeg The other three similar commands CTRL W H CTRL W J CTRL W L move window to move window to move window to you can probably guess these now the far left the bottom the far right 08 6 Commands for all windows When you have several windows open and each window separately qall This stands for quit all The cursor will automatically be positioned in a window with You can then either use not exit changes throw them away If you know there are windows with changes use this command changes A quicker way If any of write you want to quit Vim you can close is using this command the windo
44. c 10 parse error before Only the lines where Vim recognized a file name and line number are listed here It assumes those are the interesting lines and the rest is just boring messages However sometimes unrecognized lines do contain something you want to see Output from the linker for example about an undefined function To see all the messages add a _ to the command clist 1 gcc g Wall o prog main c sub c 2 main c In function main 3 main c 6 too many arguments to function do_sub 4 main c At top level 5 main c 10 parse error before 6 make prog Error 1 Vim will highlight the current error To go back to the previous error use Cprevious Other commands to move around in the error list cfirst to first error Clast to last error cc 3 to error nr 3 USING ANOTHER COMPILER The name of the program to run when the make command is executed is defined by the makeprg option Usually this is set to make but Visual C users should set this to nmake by executing the following command set makeprg nmake You can also include arguments in this option Special characters need to be escaped with a backslash Example set makeprg nmake f project mak You can include special Vim keywords in the command specification The character expands to the name of the current file So if you execute the command set makeprg make When you are editing main c then make executes the followin
45. copyright vim_doc txt Page 203 vim_doc txt Page 204 usr 43 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 14 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Using filetypes When you are editing a file of a certain type for example a C program or a shell script you often use the same option settings and mappings You quickly get tired of manually setting these each time This chapter explains how to do it automatically 43 1 Plugins for a filetype 43 2 Adding a filetype Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 44 txt Your own syntax highlighted usr _42 txt Add new menus usr_toc txt 43 1 Plugins for a filetype filetype plugin How to start using filetype plugins has already been discussed here add filetype plugin But you probably are not satisfied with the default settings because they have been kept minimal Suppose that for C files you want to set the softtabstop option to 4 and define a mapping to insert a three line comment You do this with only two steps your runtime dir 1 Create your own runtime directory On Unix this usually is vim In this directory create the ftplugin directory mkdir vim mkdir vim ftplugin When you are not on Unix check the value of the runtimepath option to see where Vim will look for the ftplugin directory set runtimepath You would normally use the first directory name before the first comma You might want to prepend a directory na
46. cursor to a character you can see Thus text left and right of the window is ignored These never cause the text to scroll gO to first visible character in this line g to first non blank visible character in this line gm to middle of this line gs to last visible character in this line lt window gt some long text part of which is visible g0 g gm g BREAKING AT WORDS edit no break When preparing text for use by another program you might have to make paragraphs without a line break A disadvantage of using nowrap is that you can t see the whole sentence you are working on When wrap is on words are broken halfway which makes them hard to read A good solution for editing this kind of paragraph is setting the linebreak option Vim then breaks lines at an appropriate place when displaying the line The text in the file remains unchanged Without linebreak text might look like this letter generation program for a b ank They wanted to send out a s pecial personalized letter to th eir richest 1000 customers Unfo vim_doc txt Page 122 rtunately for the programmer he After set linebreak it looks like this letter generation program for a bank They wanted to send out a special personalized letter to their richest 1000 customers Unfortunately for the programmer Related options breakat specifies the characters where a break can be inserted showbreak specifi
47. do next You are in three c Notice that the CTRL command does not change the idea of where you are in the list of files Only commands like next and previous do that The file you were previously editing is called the alternate file When you just started Vim CTRL will not work since there isn t a previous file PREDEFINED MARKS After jumping to another file you can use two predefined marks which are very useful This takes you to the position where the cursor was when you left the file Another mark that is remembered is the position where you made the last change Suppose you are editing the file one txt Somewhere halfway the file you use x to delete a character Then you go to the last line with G and vim_doc txt Page 49 write the file with w You edit several other files and then use edit one txt to come back to one txt If you now use Vim jumps to the last line of the file Using takes you to the position where you deleted the character Even when you move around in the file and will take you to the remembered position At least until you make another change or leave the file FILE MARKS In chapter 4 was explained how you can place a mark in a file with mx and jump to that position with x That works within one file If you edit another file and place marks there these are specific for that file Thus each file has its own set of marks they are local to the file So far we
48. does a pretty good job of indenting in a way that 90 of programmers do There are different styles however so if you want to you can customize the indentation style with the cinoptions option By default cinoptions is empty and Vim uses the default style You can add various items where you want something different For example to make curly braces be placed like this if flag L 83 j 0 Use this command set cinoptions 2 There are many of these items See cinoptions values 30 3 Automatic indenting You don t want to switch on the cindent option manually every time you edit a C file This is how you make it work automatically filetype indent on Actually this does a lot more than switching on cindent for C files First of all it enables detecting the type of a file That s the same as what is used for syntax highlighting When the filetype is known Vim will search for an indent file for this type of file The Vim distribution includes a number of these for various vim_doc txt Page 156 programming languages This indent file will then prepare for automatic indenting specifically for this file If you don t like the automatic indenting you can switch it off again filetype indent off If you don t like the indenting for one specific type of file this is how you avoid it Create a file with just this one line let bidid_ indent 1 Now you need to write this in a file with a speci
49. double quotation marks in the middle of the string will end the region You need to tell Vim to skip over any escaped double quotes in the string Do this with the skip keyword syntax region xString start lt skip end The double backslash matches a single backslash since the backslash is a special character in search patterns When to use a region instead of a match The main difference is that a match item is a single pattern which must match as a whole A region starts as soon as the Start pattern matches Whether the end pattern is found or not doesn t matter Thus when the item depends on the end pattern to match you cannot use a region Otherwise regions are often simpler to define And it is easier to use nested items as is explained in the next section 44 5 Nested items Take a look at this comment Get input TODO Skip white space You want to highlight TODO in big yellow letters even though it is ina comment that is highlighted blue To let Vim know about this you define the following syntax groups Syntax keyword xTodo TODO contained Syntax match xComment contains xTodo In the first line the contained argument tells Vim that this keyword can exist only inside another syntax item The next line has contains xTodo This indicates that the xTodo syntax element is inside it The result is that the comment line as a whole is matched with xComment and made blue The word TODO insid
50. either on or off Vim has many options Besides the boolean ones there are options with a numerical value and string options You will see examples of this where they are used 3 Set the ruler option This will display the cursor position in the lower right corner of the Vim window set ruler Using the ruler option has the advantage that it doesn t take much room thus there is more space for your text 03 7 Scrolling around The CTRL U command scrolls down half a screen of text Think of looking through a viewing window at the text and moving this window up by half the height of the window Thus the window moves up over the text which is backward in the file Don t worry if you have a little trouble remembering which end is up Most users have the same problem The CTRL D command moves the viewing window down half a screen in the file thus scrolls the text up half a screen some text some text some text some text some text CTRL U gt 123456 123456 7890 example CTRL D 7890 example example example example vim_doc txt Page 20 To scroll one line at a time use CTRL E scroll up and CTRL Y scroll down Think of CTRL E to give you one line Extra If you use MS Windows compatible key mappings CTRL Y will redo a change instead of scroll To scroll forward by a whole screen except for two lines use CTRL F The other way is backward CTRL B is the command to use
51. few ways to make Vim display colors not only for an xterm vim_doc txt Page 43 The file type is not recognized Vim doesn t know all file types and sometimes it s near to impossible to tell what language a file uses Try this command set filetype If the result is filetype then the problem is indeed that Vim doesn t know what type of file this is You can set the type manually set filetype fortran To see which types are available look in the directory SVIMRUNTIME syntax For the GUI you can use the Syntax menu Setting the filetype can also be done with a modeline so that the file will be highlighted each time you edit it For example this line can be used in a Makefile put it near the start or end of the file vim syntax make You might know how to detect the file type yourself Often the file name extension after the dot can be used See new filetype for how to tell Vim to detect that file type There is no highlighting for your file type You could try using a similar file type by manually setting it as mentioned above If that isn t good enough you can write your own syntax file see mysyntaxfile Or the colors could be wrong The colored text is very hard to read Vim guesses the background color that you are using If it is black or another dark color it will use light colors for text If it is white or another light color it will use dark colors for text If Vim guessed wrong the te
52. from the beginning and searches from the start of the file to the cursor location Keep in mind that when repeating the n command to search for the next match you eventually get back to the first match If you don t notice this you keep searching forever To give you a hint Vim displays this message search hit BOTTOM continuing at TOP If you use the command to search in the other direction you get this message search hit TOP continuing at BOTTOM Still you don t know when you are back at the first match One way to see this is by switching on the ruler option set ruler Vim will display the cursor position in the lower righthand corner of the window in the status line if there is one It looks like this 101 29 84 The first number is the line number of the cursor Remember the line number where you started so that you can check if you passed this position again NOT WRAPPING To turn off search wrapping use the following command set nowrapscan Now when the search hits the end of the file an error message displays E385 search hit BOTTOM without match for forever Thus you can find all matches by going to the start of the file with gg and keep searching until you see this message If you search in the other direction using you get E384 search hit TOP without match for forever 27 3 Offsets By default the search command leaves the cursor positioned on the beginning of the pattern You c
53. function This is a bit complicated but it s required for the plugin to work together with other plugins The basic rule is that you use lt SID gt Add in mappings and s Add in other places the script itself autocommands user commands We can also add a menu entry to do the same as the mapping 26 noremenu lt script gt Plugin Add Correction lt SID gt Add The Plugin menu is recommended for adding menu items for plugins In this case only one item is used When adding more items creating a submenu is recommended For example Plugin CVS could be used for a plugin that offers CVS operations Plugin CVS checkin Plugin CVS checkout etc Note that in line 28 noremap is used to avoid that any other mappings cause trouble Someone may have remapped call for example In line 24 we also use noremap but we do want lt SID gt Add to be remapped This is why lt script gt is used here This only allows mappings which are local to the script map lt script gt The same is done in line 26 for noremenu menu lt script gt lt SID gt AND lt Plug gt using lt Plug gt Both lt SID gt and lt Plug gt are used to avoid that mappings of typed keys interfere with mappings that are only to be used from other mappings Note the difference between using lt SID gt and lt Plug gt lt Plug gt is visible outside of the script It is used for mappings which the user might want to map a key sequence to lt
54. g for registry files When writing the file Vim will compare fileencoding with encoding If they are different the text will be converted An empty value for fileencoding means that no conversion is to be done Thus the text is assumed to be encoded with encoding vim_doc txt Page 221 If the default fileencodings value is not good for you set it to the encodings you want Vim to try Only when a value is found to be invalid will the next one be used Putting latinl first doesn t work because it is never illegal An example to fall back to Japanese when the file doesn t have a BOM and isn t utf 8 set fileencodings ucs bom utf 8 sjis See encoding values for suggested values Other values may work as well This depends on the conversion available FORCING AN ENCODING If the automatic detection doesn t work you must tell Vim what encoding the file is Example edit enc koi8 r russian txt The enc part specifies the name of the encoding to be used for this file only Vim will convert the file from the specified encoding Russian in this example to encoding fileencoding will also be set to the specified encoding so that the reverse conversion can be done when writing the file The same argument can be used when writing the file This way you can actually use Vim to convert a file Example write enc utf 8 russian txt Conversion may result in lost characters Conversion from an encoding to Unico
55. getftime localtime strftime tempname delete rename system hostname Page 182 check if a directory exists get the current working directory get the size of a file get last modification time of a file get current time convert time to a string get the name of a temporary file delete a file rename a file get the result of a shell command name of the system windows and the argument list argc argidx argv bufexists buflisted buf loaded bufname bufnr winnr bufwinnr winbufnr getbufvar setbufvar getwinvar setwinvar foldclosed foldlevel foldtext Syntax highlighting History hlexists h1ID synID synIDattr synIDtrans histadd histdel histget histnr Interactive confirm getchar getcharmod input inputsecret inputdialog Vim server Various serverlist remote_send remote_expr server2client remote_peek remote_read foreground remote foreground mode visualmode hasmapto mapcheck maparg exists has number of entries in the argument list current position in the argument list get one entry from the argument list check if a buffer exists check if a buffer exists and is listed check if a buffer exists and is loaded get the name of a specific buffer get the buffer number of a specific buffer get the window number for the current wind
56. gt lt Tab gt lt BS gt 9 gt lt Tab gt lt Tab gt lt Tab gt lt BS gt lt BS gt An alternative is to use the smarttab option When it s set Vim uses shiftwidth for a lt Tab gt typed in the indent of a line and a real lt Tab gt when typed after the first non blank character However lt BS gt doesn t work like with softtabstop JUST SPACES If you want absolutely no tabs in your file you can set the expandtab option set expandtab When this option is set the lt Tab gt key inserts a series of spaces Thus you get the same amount of white space as if a lt Tab gt character was inserted but there isn t a real lt Tab gt character in your file The backspace key will delete each space by itself Thus after typing one lt Tab gt you have to press the lt BS gt key up to eight times to undo it If you are in the indent pressing CTRL D will be a lot quicker CHANGING TABS IN SPACES AND BACK Setting expandtab does not affect any existing tabs In other words any tabs in the document remain tabs If you want to convert tabs to spaces use the retab command Use these commands set expandtab retab Now Vim will have changed all indents to use spaces instead of tabs However all tabs that come after a non blank character are kept If you want these to be converted as well add a sretab This is a little bit dangerous because it can also change tabs inside a string To check if
57. have done it because you wanted case to match That s smart With these two options set you find the following matches pattern matches word word Word WORD WoRd etc Word Word WORD WORD WoRd WoRd CASE IN ONE PATTERN If you want to ignore case for one specific pattern you can do this by prepending the c string Using C will make the pattern to match case This overrules the ignorecase and smartcase options when c or C is used their value doesn t matter pattern matches Cword word CWord Word cword word Word WORD WoRd etc cWord word Word WORD WoRd etc vim_doc txt Page 130 A big advantage of using c and C is that it sticks with the pattern Thus if you repeat a pattern from the search history the same will happen no matter if ignorecase or smartcase was changed The use of items in search patterns depends on the magic option In this chapters we will assume magic is on because that is the standard and recommended setting If you would change magic many search patterns would suddenly become invalid If your search takes much longer than you expected you can interrupt it with CTRL C on Unix and CTRL Break on MS DOS and MS Windows 27 2 Wrapping around the file end By default a forward search starts searching for the given string at the current cursor location It then proceeds to the end of the file If it has not found the string by that time it starts
58. if foldopen contains hor which is the default The foldopen option can be changed to open folds for specific commands If you want the line under the cursor always to be open do this 86t Loldopen all Warning You won t be able to move onto a closed fold then You might want to use this only temporarily and then set it back to the default set foldopens amp You can make folds close automatically when you move out of it set foldclose all This will re apply foldlevel to all folds that don t contain the cursor You have to try it out if you like how this feels Use zm to fold more and zr to fold less reduce folds The folding is local to the window This allows you to open two windows on the same buffer one with folds and one without folds Or one with all folds closed and one with all folds open 28 4 Saving and restoring folds When you abandon a file starting to edit another one the state of the folds is lost If you come back to the same file later all manually opened and closed folds are back to their default When folds have been created manually all folds are gone To save the folds use the mkview command mkview This will store the settings and other things that influence the view on the file You can change what is stored with the viewoptions option When you come back to the same file later you can load the view again Lloadview You can store up to ten views on one file For exampl
59. instead of the slash A plus for example stone two one or two vim_doc txt Page 68 10 3 Command ranges The substitute command and many other commands can be applied to a selection of lines This is called a range The simple form of a range is number number For example 1 5s this that g Executes the substitute command on the lines 1 to 5 Line 5 is included The range is always placed before the command A single number can be used to address one specific line 54s President Fool Some commands work on the whole file when you do not specify a range To make them work on the current line the address is used The write command works like that Without a range it writes the whole file To make it write only the current line into a file write otherfile The first line always has number one How about the last line The character is used for this For example to substitute in the lines from the cursor to the end 8s yes no The S range that we used before is actually a short way to say 1 from the first to the last line USING A PATTERN IN A RANGE Suppose you are editing a chapter in a book and want to replace all occurrences of grey with gray But only in this chapter not in the next one You know that only chapter boundaries have the word Chapter in the first column This command will work then Chapter Chapter s grey gray g You can see a search patt
60. is used which means the line where the cursor The substitute function does something similar to the substitute command The first argument is the string on which to perform the substitution The second argument is the pattern the third the replacement string Finally the last arguments are the flags The setline function sets the line specified by the first argument toa new string the second argument In this example the line under the cursor is replaced with the result of the substitute Thus the effect of the three statements is equal to substitute a g Using the functions becomes more interesting when you do more work before and after the substitute call FUNCTIONS function list There are many functions We will mention them here grouped by what they are used for You can find an alphabetical list here functions Use CTRL on the function name to jump to detailed help on it String manipulation char2nr get ASCII value of a character nr2char get a character by its ASCII value escape escape characters in a string with a strtrans translate a string to make it printable tolower turn a string to lowercase toupper turn a string to uppercase match position where a pattern matches in a string matchend position where a pattern match ends in a string matchstr match of a pattern in a string stridx first index of a short string in a long string strridx last index of a short str
61. it 42 3 Various You can change the appearance of the menus with flags in guioptions In the default value they are all included You can remove a flag with a command like set guioptions m m When removed the menubar is not displayed M When removed the default menus are not loaded g When removed the inactive menu items are not made grey but are completely removed Does not work on all systems t When removed the tearoff feature is not enabled The dotted line at the top of a menu is not a separator line When you select this item the menu is teared off It is displayed in a separate window This is called a tearoff menu This is useful when you use the same menu often For translating menu items see menutrans Since the mouse has to be used to select a menu item it is a good idea to use the browse command for selecting a file And confirm to get a dialog instead of an error message e g when the current buffer contains changes These two can be combined amenu File Open browse confirm edit lt CR gt The browse makes a file browser appear to select the file to edit The confirm will pop up a dialog when the current buffer has changes You can then select to save the changes throw them away or cancel the command For more complicated items the confirm and inputdialog functions can be used The default menus contain a few examples vim_doc txt Page 202 42 4 Toolbar and po
62. it manually To recover the file use this command sLeCcover Vim cannot always detect that a swap file already exists for a file This is the case when the other edit session puts the swap files in another directory or when the path name for the file is different when editing it on different machines Therefore don t rely on Vim always warning you If you really don t want to see this message you can add the A flag to the shortmess option But it s very unusual that you need this 11 4 Further reading swap file An explanation about where the swap file will be created and what its name is preserve Manually flushing the swap file to disk Swapname See the name of the swap file for the current file updatecount Number of key strokes after which the swap file is flushed to disk updatetime Timeout after which the swap file is flushed to disk swapsync Whether the disk is synced when the swap file is flushed directory List of directory names where to store the swap file maxmem Limit for memory usage before writing text to the swap file maxmemtot Same but for all files in total Next chapter usr_12 txt Clever tricks Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 81 usK_12 CxE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 22 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Clever tricks By combining several commands you can make Vim do nearly everything In this chapter a number of useful combin
63. line is used to continue the command from the previous line That avoids a line getting very long See line continuation This only works in a Vim script file not when typing commands at the command line vim_doc txt Page 36 05 3 Simple mappings A mapping enables you to bind a set of Vim commands to a single key Suppose for example that you need to surround certain words with curly braces In other words you need to change a word such as amount into amount With the map command you can tell Vim that the F5 key does this job The command is as follows map lt F5 gt i lt Esc gt ea lt Esc gt When entering this command you must enter lt F5 gt by typing four characters Similarly lt Esc gt is not entered by pressing the lt Esc gt key but by typing five characters Watch out for this difference when reading the manual Let s break this down lt F5 gt The F5 function key This is the trigger key that causes the command to be executed as the key is pressed i lt Esc gt Insert the character The lt Esc gt key ends Insert mode e Move to the end of the word a lt Esc gt Append the to the word After you execute the map command all you have to do to put around a word is to put the cursor on the first character and press F5 In this example the trigger is a single key it can be any string But when you use an existing Vim command that command will no longer be available You better a
64. move the mouse quite a bit to use such an item The menu command is very similar to the map command the left side specifies how the item is triggered and the right hand side defines the characters that are executed keys are characters they are used just like you would have typed them Thus in Insert mode when keys is plain text that text is inserted ACCELERATORS The ampersand character amp is used to indicate an accelerator For instance you can use Alt F to select File and S to select Save The winaltkeys option may disable this though Therefore the menu item looks like amp File amp Save The accelerator characters will be underlined in the menu You must take care that each key is used only once in each menu Otherwise you will not know which of the two will actually be used Vim doesn t warn you for this PRIORITIES The actual definition of the File Save menu item is as follows menu 10 340 amp File amp Save lt Tab gt w confirm w lt CR gt The number 10 340 is called the priority number It is used by the editor to decide where it places the menu item The first number 10 indicates the position on the menu bar Lower numbered menus are positioned to the left higher numbers to the right These are the priorities used for the standard menus 10 20 40 50 60 70 9999 vim_doc txt Page 199 File Edit Tools Syntax Buffers Window Help Notice that the Help menu is given a v
65. name between characters is used by the help system to define a tag hyperlink destination See 29 1 for details about using tags vim_doc txt Page 15 To get help on a given subject use the following command help subject To get help on the x command for example enter the following help x To find out how to delete text use this command help deleting To get a complete index of all Vim commands use the following command help index When you need to get help for a control character command for example CTRL A you need to spell it with the prefix CTRL help CTRL A The Vim editor has many different modes By default the help system displays the normal mode commands For example the following command displays help for the normal mode CTRL H command help CTRL H To identify other modes use a mode prefix If you want the help for the insert mode version of a command use i_ For CTRL H this gives you the following command help i_CTRL H When you start the Vim editor you can use several command line arguments These all begin with a dash To find what the t argument does for example use the command help t The Vim editor has a number of options that enable you to configure and customize the editor If you want help for an option you need to enclose it in single quotation marks To find out what the number option does for example use the following command help number The table with
66. only works when Vim was compiled to handle it To find out if it works use the version command and check the output for multi_byte If it s there you are OK If you see _multi_byte you will have to find another Vim USING UNICODE IN THE GUI The nice thing about Unicode is that other encodings can be converted to it and back without losing information When you make Vim use Unicode internally you will be able to edit files in any encoding Unfortunately the number of systems supporting Unicode is still limited Thus it s unlikely that your language uses it You need to tell Vim you want to use Unicode and how to handle interfacing with the rest of the system Let s start with the GUI version of Vim which is able to display Unicode characters This should work set encoding utf 8 set guifont misc fixed medium r normal 18 120 100 100 c 90 is010646 1 The encoding option tells Vim the encoding of the characters that you use This applies to the text in buffers files you are editing registers Vim script files etc You can regard encoding as the setting for the internals of Vim This example assumes you have this font on your system The name in the example is for the X Window System This font is in a package that is used to enhance xterm with Unicode support If you don t have this font you might find it here http www cl cam ac uk mgk25 download ucs fonts tar gz For MS Windows some fonts have a limi
67. options You can write your own compiler files See write compiler plugin OUTPUT REDIRECTION The make command redirects the output of the executed program to an error file How this works depends on various things such as the shell If your make command doesn t capture the output check the makeef and shellpipe options The shellquote and shellxquote options might also matter In case you can t get make to redirect the file for you an alternative is to compile the program in another window and redirect the output into a file Then have Vim read this file with cfile filename Jumping to errors will work like with the make command 30 2 Indenting C files A program is much easier to understand when the lines have been properly indented Vim offers various ways to make this less work For C programs set the cindent option Vim knows a lot about C programs and will try very hard to automatically set the indent for you Set the shiftwidth option to the amount of spaces you want for a deeper level Four spaces will work fine One set command will do it set cindent shiftwidth 4 With this option enabled when you type something such as if x the next line will automatically be indented an additional level if flag Automatic indent gt do_the_work Automatic unindent lt if other flag vim_doc txt Page 155 Automatic indent gt do file keep indent do_some_more
68. options There are an awful lot of options Most of them you will hardly ever use Some of the more useful ones will be mentioned here Don t forget you can find more help on these options with the help command with single quotes before and after the option name For example help wrap In case you have messed up an option value you can set it back to the default by putting a ampersand amp after the option name Example set iskeyword amp vim_doc txt Page 40 NOT WRAPPING LINES Vim normally wraps long lines so that you can see all of the text Sometimes it s better to let the text continue right of the window Then you need to scroll the text left right to see all of a long line Switch wrapping of with this command set nowrap Vim will automatically scroll the text when you move to text that is not displayed To see a context of ten characters do this set sidescroll 10 This doesn t change the text in the file only the way it is displayed WRAPPING MOVEMENT COMMANDS Most commands for moving around will stop moving at the start and end of a line You can change that with the whichwrap option This sets it to the default value set whichwrap b s This allows the lt BS gt key when used in the first position of a line to move the cursor to the end of the previous line And the lt Space gt key moves from the end of a line to the start of the next one To allow the cursor keys lt Left gt and lt Right gt
69. remapping mappings defined in this script that start with lt SID gt The user must have a chance to disable the mappings in a filetype plugin without disabling everything Here is an example of how this is done for a plugin for the mail filetype Add mappings unless the user didn t want this if exists no plugin maps amp amp exists no_ mail_maps Quote text by inserting gt if hasmapto lt Plug gt MailQuote vmap lt buffer gt lt LocalLeadersq lt Plug gt MailQuote nmap lt buffer gt lt LocalLeader gt q lt Plug gt MailQuote endif vnoremap lt buffer gt lt Plug gt MailQuote s gt lt CR gt nnoremap lt buffer gt lt Plug gt MailQuote s gt lt CR gt endif Two global variables are used no plugin_maps disables mappings for all filetype plugins no mail maps disables mappings for a specific filetype USER COMMANDS To add a user command for a specific file type so that it can only be used in one buffer use the buffer argument to command Example command buffer Make make r s VARIABLES A filetype plugin will be sourced for each buffer of the type it s for Local script variables s var will be shared between all invocations Use local buffer variables b var if you want a variable specifically for one buffer FUNCTIONS When defining a function this only needs to be done once But the filetype plugin will be sourced every time a file with this filetype will be opened
70. root of the file name with sr doautocmd executes on the current buffer The doautoall command works like doautocmd except it executes on all the buffers USING NORMAL MODE COMMANDS The commands executed by an autocommand are Command line command If you want to use a Normal mode command the normal command can be used Example autocmd BufReadPost log normal G This will make the cursor jump to the last line of log files when you start to edit it Using the normal command is a bit tricky First of all make sure its argument is a complete command including all the arguments When you use i to go to Insert mode there must also be a lt Esc gt to leave Insert mode again If you use a to start a search pattern there must be a lt CR gt to execute it The normal command uses all the text after it as commands Thus there can be no and another command following To work around this put the normal command inside an execute command This also makes it possible to pass unprintable characters in a convenient way Example autocmd BufReadPost chg execute normal ONew entry lt Esc gt lread date This also shows the use of a backslash to break a long command into more lines This can be used in Vim scripts not at the command line When you want the autocommand do something complicated which involves jumping around in the file and then returning to the original position you may want to re
71. see write local help 05 6 The option window If you are looking for an option that does what you want you can search in the help files here options Another way is by using this command options This opens a new window with a list of options with a one line explanation The options are grouped by subject Move the cursor to a subject and press lt Enter gt to jump there Press lt Enter gt again to jump back Or use CTRL O You can change the value of an option For example move to the displaying text subject Then move the cursor down to this line set wrap nowrap When you hit lt Enter gt the line will change to set nowrap wrap The option has now been switched off Just above this line is a short description of the wrap option Move the cursor one line up to place it in this line Now hit lt Enter gt and you jump to the full help on the wrap option For options that take a number or string argument you can edit the value Then press lt Enter gt to apply the new value For example move the cursor a few lines up to this line set so 0 Position the cursor on the zero with Change it into a five with r5 Then press lt Enter gt to apply the new value When you now move the cursor around you will notice that the text starts scrolling before you reach the border This is what the scrolloff option does it specifies an offset from the window border where scrolling starts 05 7 Often used
72. that the old text is put back Thus it works like an undo command for the last typed character 04 10 Conclusion The operators movement commands and text objects give you the possibility to make lots of combinations Now that you know how it works you can use N operators with M movement commands to make N M commands You can find a list of operators here operator For example there are many other ways to delete pieces of text Here area few often used ones x delete character under the cursor short for dl X delete character before the cursor short for dh D delete from cursor to end of line short for ds dw delete from cursor to next start of word db delete from cursor to previous start of word diw delete word under the cursor excluding white space daw delete word under the cursor including white space dG delete until the end of the file dgg delete until the start of the file If you use c instead of d they become change commands And with y you yank the text And so forth There are a few often used commands to make changes that didn t fit somewhere else change case of the character under the cursor and move the cursor to the next character This is not an operator unless tildeop is set thus you can t use it with a motion command It does works in Visual mode and changes case for all the selected text then I Start Insert mode after moving the cursor to the first non blank in th
73. the lt Alt gt key The default value menu is the smart choice If the key combination is a menu shortcut it can t be mapped All other keys are available for mapping The value no doesn t use any lt Alt gt keys for the menus Thus you must use the mouse for the menus and all lt Alt gt keys can be mapped The value yes means that Vim will use any lt Alt gt keys for the menus Some lt Alt gt key combinations may also do other things than selecting a menu 31 4 Vim window position and size To see the current Vim window position on the screen use winpos This will only work in the GUI The output may look like this Window position X 272 Y 103 The position is given in screen pixels Now you can use the numbers to move Vim somewhere else For example to move it to the left a hundred pixels winpos 172 103 There may be a small offset between the reported position and where the window moves This is because of the border around the window This is added by the window manager You can use this command in your startup script to position the window at a specific position The size of the Vim window is computed in characters Thus this depends on the size of the font being used You can see the current size with this command set lines columns To change the size set the lines and or columns options to a new value set lines 50 set columns 8s0 Obtaining the size works in a terminal just like in the G
74. the matches There is another way Type this command set hlsearch If you now search for nr Vim will highlight all matches That is a very good way to see where the variable is used without the need to type commands To switch this off set nohlsearch Then you need to switch it on again if you want to use it for the next search vim_doc txt Page 22 command If you only want to remove the highlighting use this command nohlsearch This doesn t reset the option Instead it disables the highlighting As soon as you execute a search command the highlighting will be used again Also for the n and N commands TUNING SEARCHES There are a few options that change how searching works These are the essential ones set incsearch This makes Vim display the match for the string while you are still typing it Use this to check if the right match will be found Then press lt Enter gt to really jump to that location Or type more to change the search string set nowrapscan This stops the search at the end of the file Or when you are searching backwards at the start of the file The wrapscan option is on by default thus searching wraps around the end of the file INTERMEZZO If you like one of the options mentioned before and set it each time you use Vim you can put the command in your Vim startup file Edit the file as mentioned at not compatible Or use this command to find out where it is Sscriptnames Edit the fi
75. the most basic Vim functionality hands on On Unix and MS Windows if Vim has been properly installed you can start it from the shell vimtutor This will make a copy of the tutor file so that you can edit it without the risk of damaging the original There are a few translated versions of the tutor To find out if yours is available use the two letter language code For French vimtutor fr For OpenVMS if Vim has been properly installed you can start vimtutor from a VMS prompt with VIM vimtutor Optionally add the two letter language code as above On other systems you have to do a little work 1 Copy the tutor file You can do this with Vim it knows where to find it vim u NONE c e SVIMRUNTIME tutor tutor c w TUTORCOPY c q This will write the file TUTORCOPY in the current directory To use a translated version of the tutor append the two letter language code to the filename For French vim u NONE c e SVIMRUNTIME tutor tutor fr c w TUTORCOPY c q 2 Edit the copied file with Vim vim u NONE c Set nocp TUTORCOPY The extra arguments make sure Vim is started in a good mood 3 Delete the copied file when you are finished with it Page 7 vim_doc txt del TUTORCOPY 01 4 Copyright manual copyright The Vim user manual and reference manual are Copyright c 1988 2003 by Bram Moolenaar This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Ope
76. these exist you could use this I HE xE 1s xX It s recommended not to use hard tabs inside a string Replace them with t to avoid trouble The other way around works just as well vim_doc txt Page 159 set noexpandtab retab 30 6 Formatting comments One of the great things about Vim is that it understands comments You can ask Vim to format a comment and it will do the right thing Suppose for example that you have the following comment This is a test of the text formatting td You then ask Vim to format it by positioning the cursor at the start of the comment and type gq gq is the operator to format text is the motion that takes you to the end of a comment The result is This is a test of the text formatting y Notice that Vim properly handled the beginning of each line An alternative is to select the text that is to be formatted in Visual mode and type gq To add a new line to the comment position the cursor on the middle line and press o The result looks like this This is a test of the text formatting sy Vim has automatically inserted a star and a space for you Now you can type the comment text When it gets longer than textwidth Vim will break the line Again the star is inserted automatically This is a test of the text formatting Typing a lot of text here will make Vim break dj For this to work some flags must be p
77. this match the solder holding one of the chips melted and the XXX And with the we find this one the solder holding one of the chips melted and the XXX You can try searching with theS it will only match a single line consisting of the White space does matter here thus if a line contains a space after the word like the the pattern will not match MATCHING ANY SINGLE CHARACTER The dot character matches any existing character For example the pattern c m matches a string whose first character is a c whose second character is anything and whose the third character is m Example We use a computer that became the cummin winter XXX XXX XXX MATCHING SPECIAL CHARACTERS If you really want to match a dot you must avoid its special meaning by putting a backslash before it If you search for ter you will find these matches We use a computer that became the cummin winter XXXX XXXX Searching for ter only finds the second match 03 10 Using marks When you make a jump to a position with the G command Vim remembers the position from before this jump This position is called a mark To go back where you came from use this command This is a backtick or open single quote character If you use the same command a second time you will jump back again That s because the command is a jump itself and the position from before this jump is remembered Generally every time you do a command t
78. to do this depends on the system you are using Unix cp i S VIMRUNTIME vimrc_example vim vimre MS DOS MS Windows OS 2 copy S VIMRUNTIME vimre_ example vim VIM _vimre Amiga copy SVIMRUNTIME vimre_ example vim VIM vimre If the file already exists you probably want to keep it vim_doc txt If you start Vim now the compatible option should be off You can check it with this command set compatible If it responds with nocompatible you are doing well If the response is compatible you are in trouble You will have to find out why the option is still set Perhaps the file you wrote above is not found Use this command to find out scriptnames If your file is not in the list check its location and name If it is in the list there must be some other place where the compatible option is switched back on For more info see vimrc and compatible default This manual is about using Vim in the normal way There is an alternative called evim easy Vim This is still Vim but used in a way that resembles a click and type editor like Notepad It always stays in Insert mode thus it feels very different It is not explained in the user manual since it should be mostly self explanatory See evim keys for details 01 3 Using the Vim tutor tutor vimtutor Instead of reading the text boring you can use the vimtutor to learn your first Vim commands This is a 30 minute tutorial that teaches
79. to the current block of lines inside The and lines themselves are left unmodified gt a includes them In this example the cursor is on printf original text after gt i after gt a if flag if flag if flag printf yes print yes printf yes flag Q flag 0 flag Oy 30 5 Tabs and spaces tabstop is set to eight by default Although you can change it you quickly run into trouble later Other programs won t know what tabstop value you used They probably use the default value of eight and your text suddenly looks very different Also most printers use a fixed tabstop value of eight Thus it s best to keep tabstop alone If you edit a file which was written with a different tabstop setting see 25 3 for how to fix that For indenting lines in a program using a multiple of eight spaces makes you quickly run into the right border of the window Using a single space doesn t provide enough visual difference Many people prefer to use four spaces a good compromise Since a lt Tab gt is eight spaces and you want to use an indent of four spaces you can t use a lt Tab gt character to make your indent There are two ways to handle this 1 Use a mix of lt Tab gt and space characters Since a lt Tab gt takes the place of eight spaces you have fewer characters in your file Inserting a lt Tab gt is quicker than eight spaces Backspacing works faster as well 2 Use spaces o
80. to the third item in the list Remember that you can use CTRL O to jump back to where you started from RELATED COMMANDS i only lists the first match I only lists items below the cursor Ji only lists the first item below the cursor FINDING DEFINED IDENTIFIERS The I command finds any identifier To find only macros defined with define use D Again this searches in included files The define option specifies what a line looks like that defines the items for D You could change it to make it work with other languages than C or C The commands related to D are d only lists the first match D only lists items below the cursor jd only lists the first item below the cursor 29 5 Finding local identifiers The I command searches included files To search in the current file only and jump to the first place where the word under the cursor is used gD Hint Goto Definition This command is very useful to find a variable or function that was declared locally Static in C terms Example cursor on Counter gt static int counter 0 int get counter void vim_doc txt Page 151 gD counter return counter To restrict the search even further and look only in the current function use this command gd This will go back to the start of the current function and find the first occurrence of the word under the cursor Actually it searches backwards to an empty line above the a
81. used to tell the file browser where to start Example browse split etc The file browser will pop up starting in the directory etc The browse command can be prepended to just about any command that opens a file If no directory is specified Vim will decide where to start the file browser By default it uses the same directory as the last time Thus when you used browse split and selected a file in usr local share the next time you use a browse it will start in usr local share again This can be changed with the browsedir option It can have one of three values last Use the last directory browsed default buffer Use the same directory as the current buffer current use the current directory For example when you are in the directory usr editing the file usr local share readme then the command set browsedir buffer browse edit Will start the browser in usr local share Alternatively set browsedir current browse edit Will start the browser in usr To avoid using the mouse most file browsers offer using key presses to navigate Since this is different for every system it is not explained here Vim uses a standard browser when possible your vim_doc txt Page 162 system documentation should contain an explanation on the keyboard shortcuts somewhere When you are not using the GUI version you could use the file explorer window to select files like in a file browser However thi
82. using Normal mode commands For batch processing however Normal mode commands do not result in clear commented command files so here you will use Ex mode instead This mode gives you a nice command line interface that makes it easy to put into a batch file Ex command is just another name for a vim_doc txt Page 127 command line command The Ex mode commands you need are as follows s person Jones g write tempfile quit You put these commands in the file change vim Now to run the editor in batch mode use this shell script for file in txt do vim e s file lt change vim lpr r tempfile done The for done loop is a shell construct to repeat the two lines in between while the file variable is set to a different file name each time The second line runs the Vim editor in Ex mode e argument on the file file and reads commands from the file change vim The s argument tells Vim to operate in silent mode In other words do not keep outputting the prompt or any other prompt for that matter The lpr r tempfile command prints the resulting tempfile and deletes it that s what the r argument does READING FROM STDIN Vim can read text on standard input Since the normal way is to read commands there you must tell Vim to read text instead This is done by passing the _ argument in place of a file Example ls vim This allows you to edit the output of the 1s command without first sav
83. vimre file Vim reads it when it starts up and executes the commands You can set options to values you prefer And you can use any colon command in it commands that start with a these are sometimes referred to as Ex commands or command line commands Syntax files are also Vim scripts As are files that set options for a specific file type A complicated macro can be defined by a separate Vim script file You can think of other uses yourself Let s start with a simple example let i 1 while i lt 5 echo count is i let i i 1 endwhile The characters are not really needed here You only need to use them when you type a command In a Vim script file they can be left out We will use them here anyway to make clear these are colon commands and make them stand out from Normal mode commands The let command assigns a value to a variable The generic form is let variable expression In this case the variable name is i and the expression is a simple value the number one The while command starts a loop The generic form is while condition statements endwhile The statements until the matching endwhile are executed for as long as the condition is true The condition used here is the expression i lt 5 This is true when the variable i is smaller than five The echo command prints its arguments In this case the string count is and the value of the variable i Since i is one this will pri
84. were using marks with a lowercase letter There are also marks with an uppercase letter These are global they can be used from any file For example suppose that we are editing the file foo txt Go to halfway the file 50 and place the F mark there F for foo 50 mF Now edit the file bar txt and place the B mark B for bar at its last line GmB Now you can use the F command to jump back to halfway foo txt Or edit yet another file type B and you are at the end of bar txt again The file marks are remembered until they are placed somewhere else Thus you can place the mark do hours of editing and still be able to jump back to that mark It s often useful to think of a simple connection between the mark letter and where it is placed For example use the H mark in a header file M in a Makefile and C in a C code file To see where a specific mark is give an argument to the marks command marks M You can also give several arguments marks MCP Don t forget that you can use CTRL O and CTRL I to jump to older and newer positions without placing marks there 07 4 Backup files Usually Vim does not produce a backup file If you want to have one all you need to do is execute the following command set backup The name of the backup file is the original file with a added to the end If your file is named data txt for example the backup file name is data txt If you do not like the fact that the ba
85. will then be called data txt or whatever you specified with backupext If you leave patchmode empty that is the default the original file will not be kept 07 5 Copy text between files This explains how to copy text from one file to another Let s start witha simple example Edit the file that contains the text you want to copy Move the cursor to the start of the text and press v This starts Visual mode Now move the cursor to the end of the text and press y This yanks copies the selected text To copy the above paragraph you would do edit thisfile sTHis vjjjj y Now edit the file you want to put the text in Move the cursor to the character where you want the text to appear after Use p to put the text there edit otherfile There pP Of course you can use many other commands to yank the text For example to select whole lines start Visual mode with V Or use CTRL V to select a rectangular block Or use Y to yank a single line yaw to yank a word etc The p command puts the text after the cursor Use P to put the text before the cursor Notice that Vim remembers if you yanked a whole line or a block and puts it back that way USING REGISTERS When you want to copy several pieces of text from one file to another having to switch between the files and writing the target file takes a lot of time To avoid this copy each piece of text to its own register A register is a place whe
86. will explain how to install the help file so that you can easily find help for your new plugin Let us use the matchit vim plugin as an example it is included with Vim This plugin makes the command jump to matching HTML tags if else endif in Vim scripts etc Very useful although it s not backwards compatible that s why it is not enabled by default This plugin comes with documentation matchit txt Let s first copy the plugin to the right directory This time we will do it from inside Vim so that we can use S VIMRUNTIME You may skip some of the mkdir commands if you already have the directory mkdir vim mkdir vim plugin cp SVIMRUNTIME macros matchit vim vim plugin Now create a doc directory in one of the directories in runtimepath imkdir vim doc Copy the help file to the doc directory cp SVIMRUNTIME macros matchit txt vim doc Now comes the trick which allows you to jump to the subjects in the new help vim_doc txt Page 39 file Generate the local tags file with the helptags command helptags vim doc Now you can use the help g command to find help for g in the help file you just added You can see an entry for the local help file when you do help local additions The title lines from the local help files are automagically added to this section There you can see which local help files have been added and jump to them through the tag For writing a local help file
87. xterm u8 fn misc fixed medium r normal 18 120 100 100 c 90 is010646 1 Now you can run Vim inside this terminal Set encoding to utf 8 as before That s all USING UNICODE IN AN ORDINARY TERMINAL Suppose you want to work with Unicode files but don t have a terminal with Unicode support You can do this with Vim although characters that are not supported by the terminal will not be displayed The layout of the text will be preserved let amp termencoding amp encoding set encoding utf 8 This is the same as what was used for the GUI But it works differently Vim will convert the displayed text before sending it to the terminal That avoids that the display is messed up with strange characters For this to work the conversion between termencoding and encoding must be possible Vim will convert from latinl to Unicode thus that always works For other conversions the iconv feature is required Try editing a file with Unicode characters in it You will notice that Vim will put a question mark or underscore or some other character in places where a character should be that the terminal can t display Move the cursor to a question mark and use this command ga Vim will display a line with the code of the character This gives you a hint about what character it is You can look it up in a Unicode table You could actually view a file that way if you have lots of time at hand Since encoding is used for all te
88. 06 endif if getline 1 xyz gt set xyz endif The first check with did_filetype is to avoid that you will check the contents of files for which the filetype was already detected by the file name That avoids wasting time on checking the file when the setf command won t do anything The scripts vim file is sourced by an autocommand in the default filetype vim file Therefore the order of checks is filetype vim files before SVIMRUNTIME in runtimepath first part of SVIMRUNTIME filetype vim all scripts vim files in runtimepath remainder of SVIMRUNTIME filetype vim filetype vim files after SVIMRUNTIME in runtimepath OP WNH If this is not sufficient for you add an autocommand that matches all files and sources a script or executes a function to check the contents of the file Next chapter usr_44 txt Your own syntax highlighted Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt usr 44 txt For Vim version 6 2 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Your own syntax Vim comes with highlighting for a couple the file you are editing isn t included get this type of file highlighted Also Page 207 Last change 2002 Oct 10 highlighted of hundred different file types If read this chapter to find out how to see syn define in the reference manual 44 1 Basic syntax commands 44 2 Keywords 44 3 Matches 44 4 Regions 44 5 Nested items 44 6 Following groups 44 7 Other arguments 4
89. 06 txt Using syntax highlighting usr_toc txt 07 1 Edit another file So far you had to start Vim for every file you wanted to edit There is a simpler way To start editing another file use this command sgdit 6o t2t You can use any file name instead of foo txt Vim will close the current file and open the new one If the current file has unsaved changes however Vim displays an error message and does not open the new file E37 No write since last change use to override Vim puts an error ID at the start of each error message If you do not understand the message or what caused it look in the help system for this ID In this case help E37 At this point you have a number of alternatives You can write the file using this command write Or you can force Vim to discard your changes and edit the new file using the force character sedit foo txt If you want to edit another file but not write the changes in the current file yet you can make it hidden hide edit foo txt The text with changes is still there but you can t see it This is further explained in section 22 4 The buffer list 07 2 A list of files You can start Vim to edit a sequence of files For example vim one c two c three c This command starts Vim and tells it that you will be editing three files Vim displays just the first file After you have done your thing in this file to edit the next file you use this c
90. 1 Cannot make changes modifiable is off You could use the M argument to setup Vim to work in a viewer mode This is vim_doc txt Page 52 only voluntary though since these commands will remove the protection set modifiable set write 07 7 Changing the file name A clever way to start editing a new file is by using an existing file that contains most of what you need For example you start writing a new program to move a file You know that you already have a program that copies a file thus you start with edit copy c You can delete the stuff you don t need Now you need to save the file under a new name The saveas command can be used for this Saveas move c Vim will write the file under the given name and edit that file Thus the next time you do write it will write move c copy c remains unmodified When you want to change the name of the file you are editing but don t want to write the file you can use this command file move c Vim will mark the file as not edited This means that Vim knows this is not the file you started editing When you try to write the file you might get this message E13 File exists use to override This protects you from accidentally overwriting another file Next chapter usr_08 txt Splitting windows Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 53 usr 08 CxE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 21 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolena
91. 4 8 Clusters 44 9 Including another syntax file 44 10 Synchronizing 44 11 Installing a syntax file 44 12 Portable syntax file layout usr 45 txt usr _ 43 txt usr_toc txt Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents Select your language Using filetypes 44 1 Basic syntax commands Using an existing syntax file to start with will save you a lot of time Try finding a syntax file in S VIMRUNTIME syntax for a language that is similar These files will also show you the normal layout of a syntax file To understand it you need to read the following Let s start with the basic arguments Before we start defining any new syntax we need to clear out any old definitions Syntax clear This isn t required in the final syntax file experimenting but very useful when There are more simplifications in this chapter file to be used by others details If you are writing a syntax read all the way through the end to find out the LISTING DEFINED ITEMS To check which syntax items are currently defined use this command syntax You can use this to check which items have actually been defined useful when you are experimenting with a new syntax file It also shows the colors used for each item which helps to find out what is what To list the items in a specific syntax group use Quite syntax list group name This also can be used to list clusters explained in 44 8 Just include the in the n
92. DOS version For use in the Win 95 98 console window vim61d16 zip 16 bit MS DOS version Only for old systems Does not support long filenames You only need one of them Although you could install both a GUI anda console version You always need to get the archive with runtime files vim lrt zip The runtime files Use your un zip program to unpack the files For example using the unzip program ed c unzip path gvim6 1 zip unzip path vim lrt zip This will unpack the files in the directory c vim vim61l If you already have a vim directory somewhere you will want to move to the directory just above it Now change to the vim vim61 directory and run the install program install Carefully look through the messages and select the options you want to use If you finally select do it the install program will carry out the actions you selected The install program doesn t move the runtime files They remain where you unpacked them In case you are not satisfied with the features included in the supplied binaries you could try compiling Vim yourself Get the source archive from the same location as where the binaries are You need a compiler for which a makefile exists Microsoft Visual C works but is expensive The Free Borland command line compiler 5 5 can be used as well as the free MingW and Cygwin compilers Check the file src INSTALLpc txt for hints 90 3 Upgrading If you are running one version of
93. G AN IDENTIFIER In C programs and many other computer languages an identifier starts with a letter and further consists of letters and digits Underscores can be used too This can be found with lt h w gt lt and gt are used to find only whole words h stands for A Za z_ and w for 0 9A Za z_ lt and gt depend on the iskeyword option If it includes for example then ident is not matched In this situation use w lt h w w This checks if w does not match before or after the identifier See lt and Next chapter usr_28 txt Folding Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 137 eUSr 28 CxE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Aug 01 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Folding Structured text can be separated in sections And sections in sub sections Folding allows you to display a section as one line providing an overview This chapter explains the different ways this can be done 28 l What is folding 28 2 Manual folding 28 3 Working with folds 28 4 Saving and restoring folds 285 Folding by indent 28 26 Folding with markers 28T Folding by syntax 28 8 Folding by expression 28 9 Folding unchanged lines 28 10 Which fold method to use Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr _29 txt Moving through programs usr_27 txt Search commands and patterns usr_toc txt 28 1 What is fol
94. IE l return 2 gt int func3 void return 3 Don t forget you can also use to move between matching That also works when they are many lines apart O MOVING IN BRACES The and commands work similar to and work on pairs instead of pairs ct lt ene if a b amp amp c d e gt amp amp x gt y MOVING IN COMMENTS To move back to the start of a comment use comment with This only works for comments gt gt A comment about ee wonderful life 1 7 Sat tS foo bar 3 Sa 1 moves backward to the end of a function and Page 148 It skips over lt The next level to find the finds the next end of a method moves The end of a function is defined by a and except that they Move forward to the end of a vim_doc txt Page 149 a short comment lt 29 4 Finding global identifiers You are editing a C program and wonder if a variable is declared as int or unsigned A quick way to find this is with the I command Suppose the cursor is on the word column Type I Vim will list the matching lines it can find Not only in the current file but also in all included files and files included in them etc The result looks like this structs h 1 29 unsigned column column number The advantage over using tag
95. L W CTRL W does the same thing in case you let go of the CTRL key a bit later CLOSE THE WINDOW To close a window use the command close Actually any command that quits editing a file works like quit and ZZ But close prevents you from accidentally exiting Vim when you close the last window CLOSING ALL OTHER WINDOWS If you have opened a whole bunch of windows but now want to concentrate on one of them this command will be useful vim_doc txt Page 54 only This closes all windows except for the current one If any of the other windows has changes you will get an error message and that window won t be closed 08 2 Split a window on another file The following command opens a second window and starts editing the given file SPLICE twe c If you were editing one c then the result looks like this file two c two c file one c one c To open a window on a new empty file use this new You can repeat the split and new commands to create as many windows as you like 08 3 Window size The split command can take a number argument If specified this will be the height of the new window For example the following opens a new window three lines high and starts editing the file alpha c 3split alpha c For existing windows you can change the size in several ways When you have a working mouse it is easy Move the mouse pointer to the statu
96. MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Making small changes This chapter shows you several ways of making corrections and moving text around It teaches you the three basic ways to change text operator motion Visual mode and text objects 04 1 Operators and motions 04 2 Changing text 04 3 Repeating a change 04 4 Visual mode 04 5 Moving text 04 6 Copying text 04 7 Using the clipboard 04 8 Text objects 04 9 Replace mode Hl 04 10 Conclusion Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 05 txt Set your settings usr 03 txt Moving around usr toc txt 04 1 Operators and motions In chapter 2 you learned the x command to delete a single character And using a count 4x deletes four characters The dw command deletes a word You may recognize the w command as the move word command In fact the d command may be followed by any motion command and it deletes from the current location to the place where the cursor winds up The 4w command for example moves the cursor over four words The d4w command deletes four words To err is human To really foul up you need a computer gt d4w To err is human you need a computer Vim only deletes up to the position where the motion takes the cursor That s because Vim knows that you probably don t want to delete the first character of a word If you use the e command to move to the end of a word Vim guesses that you do want to include that last char
97. MS Windows read dir The output of the ls or dir command is captured and inserted in the text below the cursor This is similar to reading a file except that the is used to tell Vim that a command follows The command may have arguments And a range can be used to tell where Vim should put the lines Oread date u This inserts the current time and date in UTC format at the top of the file Well if you have a date command that accepts the u argument Note the difference with using date that replaced a line while read date will insert a line WRITING TEXT TO A COMMAND The Unix command wc counts words To count the words in the current file write we This is the same write command as before but instead of a file name the character is used and the name of an external command The written text will be passed to the specified command as its standard input The output could look like this 4 47 249 The wc command isn t verbose This means you have 4 lines 47 words and 249 characters Watch out for this mistake write we vim_doc txt Page 76 This will write the file wc in the current directory with force White space is important here REDRAWING THE SCREEN If the external command produced an error message the display may have been messed up Vim is very efficient and only redraws those parts of the screen that it knows need redrawing But it can t know about what another program has wri
98. OD L Running Vim for the First Time 02 2 Inserting text 02 3 Moving around 02 4 Deleting characters 02 5 Undo and Redo 02 6 Other editing commands ODT Getting out 02 28 Finding help Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_03 txt Moving around usr Or txt About the manuals usr toc txt 02 1 Running Vim for the First Time To start Vim enter this command gvim file txt In UNIX you can type this at any command prompt If you are running Microsoft Windows open an MS DOS prompt window and enter the command In either case Vim starts editing a file called file txt Because this is a new file you get a blank window This is what your screen will look like file txt New file is the cursor position The tilde lines indicate lines not in the file In other words when Vim runs out of file to display it displays tilde lines At the bottom of the screen a message line indicates the file is named file txt and shows that you are creating a new file The message information is temporary and other information overwrites it THE VIM COMMAND The gvim command causes the editor to create a new window for editing If you use this command vim file txt the editing occurs inside your command window In other words if you are running inside an xterm the editor uses your xterm window If you are using an MS DOS command prompt window under Microsoft Windows the editing occurs i
99. Table of contents usr_30 txt Editing programs usr 28 txt Folding usr_toc txt 29 1 Using tags What is a tag It is a location where an identifier is defined An example is a function definition in a C or C program A list of tags is kept ina tags file This can be used by Vim to directly jump from any place to the tag the place where an identifier is defined To generate the tags file for all C files in the current directory use the following command ctags c Ctags is a separate program Most Unix systems already have it installed If you do not have it yet you can find Exuberant ctags here http ctags sf net Now when you are in Vim and you want to go to a function definition you can jump to it by using the following command tag startlist This command will find the function startlist even if it is in another file The CTRL command jumps to the tag of the word that is under the cursor This makes it easy to explore a tangle of C code Suppose for example that you are in the function write block You can see that it calls write line But what does write line do By placing the cursor on the call to write line and pressing CTRL you jump to the definition of this function The write line function calls write char You need to figure out what it does So you position the cursor over the call to write char and press CTRL Now you are at the definition of write char void w
100. The default behavior on a Microsoft Windows system is selected during the installation process For details about what the two behaviors are see behave Here follows a summary vim_doc txt XTERM MOUSE BEHAVIOR Left mouse click Left mouse drag Middle mouse click Right mouse click MSWIN MOUSE BEHAVIOR Left mouse click Left mouse drag Left mouse click with Shift Middle mouse click Right mouse click The mouse can be further tuned the way how the mouse works mouse mousemodel mousetime mousehide selectmode Page 63 position the cursor select text in Visual mode paste text from the clipboard extend the selected text until the mouse pointer position the cursor select text in Select mode see 09 4 extend the selected text until the mouse pointer paste text from the clipboard display a pop up menu Check out these options if you want to change in which mode the mouse is used by Vim what effect a mouse click has time between clicks for a double click hide the mouse while typing whether the mouse starts Visual or Select mode 09 3 The clipboard In section 04 7 the basic use of the clipboard was explained essential thing to explain about X windows exchange text between programs In X Windows there is the currently highlighted Current selection In Vim this is the Visual area using the default option settings There is one There are actually two places to MS
101. The editor will now open the first file where a match is found and position the cursor on the first matching line To go to the next matching line no matter in what it is file use the cnext command To go to the previous match use the cprev command Use clist to see all the matches and where they are The grep command uses the external commands grep on Unix or findstr on Windows You can change this by setting the option grepprg Next chapter usr_20 txt Typing command line commands quickly Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 86 tusr 20 ExE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Apr 30 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Typing command line commands quickly Vim has a few generic features that makes it easier to enter commands Colon commands can be abbreviated edited and repeated Completion is available for nearly everything 20 01 Command line editing 20 42 Command line abbreviations 20 2 3 Command line completion 20 4 Command line history 20 45 Command line window Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_21 txt Go away and come back usr 12 Ext Clever tricks usr_toc txt 20 1 Command line editing When you use a colon command or search for a string with or Vim puts the cursor on the bottom of the screen There you type the command or search pattern This is called the Command line Also when it s used for entering a search command Th
102. This construct make sure the function is only defined once vim_doc txt Page 196 1f exists s Func function s Func arg endfunction endif UNDO When the user does setfiletype xyz the effect of the previous filetype should be undone Set the b undo ftplugin variable to the commands that will undo the settings in your filetype plugin Example let brundo ftplugin setlocal foe come twe commentstring lt unlet b match_ignorecase b match_words b match_skip Using setlocal with lt after the option name resets the option to its global value That is mostly be best way to reset the option value This does require removing the C flag from cpoptions to allow line continuation as mentioned above use cpo save FILE NAME The filetype must be included in the file name ftplugin name Use one of these three forms ftplugin stuff vim ftplugin stuff foo vim ftplugin stuff bar vim stuff is the filetype foo and bar are arbitrary names SUMMARY ftplugin special Summary of special things to use in a filetype plugin lt LocalLeader gt Value of maplocalleader which the user defines as the keys that filetype plugin mappings start with map lt buffer gt Define a mapping local to the buffer noremap lt script gt Only remap mappings defined in this script that start with lt SID gt setlocal Set an option for the current buffer only command buffer Define a user command local t
103. This is entered by typing a tab some text lt Enter gt tab and more text The autoindent option inserts indents automatically vim_doc txt Page 120 set autoindent When a new line is started it gets the same indent as the previous line In the above example the tab after the lt Enter gt is not needed anymore INCREASING INDENT To increase the amount of indent in a line use the gt operator Often this is used as gt gt which adds indent to the current line The amount of indent added is specified with the shiftwidth option The default value is 8 To make gt gt insert four spaces worth of indent for example type this set shiftwidth 4 When used on the second line of the example text this is what you get the first line the second line 4 gt gt will increase the indent of four lines TABSTOP If you want to make indents a multiple of 4 you set shiftwidth to 4 But when pressing a Tab you still get 8 spaces worth of indent To change this set the softtabstop option set softtabstop 4 This will make the lt Tab gt key insert 4 spaces worth of indent If there are already four spaces a lt Tab gt character is used saving seven characters in the file If you always want spaces and no tab characters set the expandtab option You could set the tabstop option to 4 However if you edit the file another time with tabstop set to the default value of 8 it will look wrong In other
104. UI Setting the size is not possible in most terminals You can start the X Windows version of gvim with an argument to specify the size and position of the window gvim geometry width x height x offset y offset width and height are in characters x_offset and y_offset are in pixels Example gvim geometry 80x25 100 300 31 5 Various You can use gvim to edit an e mail message In your e mail program you must select gvim to be the editor for messages When you try that you will see that it doesn t work The mail program thinks that editing is finished while gvim is still running What happens is that gvim disconnects from the shell it was started in That is fine when you start gvim in a terminal so that you can do other work in that terminal But when you really want to wait for gvim to finish you must prevent it from disconnecting The f argument does this vim_doc txt Page 164 gvim f file txt The f stands for foreground Now Vim will block the shell it was started in until you finish editing and exit DELAYED START OF THE GUI On Unix it s possible to first start Vim in a terminal That s useful if you do various tasks in the same shell If you are editing a file and decide you want to use the GUI after all you can start it with gui Vim will open the GUI window and no longer use the terminal You can continue using the terminal for something else The f argument is used here to ru
105. Vim pick a name for the view file You can restore the view when you later edit the same file To store the view for the current window mkview Vim will decide where to store the view When you later edit the same file you get the view back with this command vim_doc txt Page 97 loadview That s easy isn t it Now you want to view the file without the number option on or with all folds open you can set the options to make the window look that way Then store this view with mkview 1 Obviously you can get this back with loadview 1 Now you can switch between the two views on the file by using loadview with and without the 1 argument You can store up to ten views for the same file this way one unnumbered and nine numbered 1 to 9 A VIEW WITH A NAME The second basic way to use views is by storing the view in a file with a name you chose This view can be loaded while editing another file Vim will then switch to editing the file specified in the view Thus you can use this to quickly switch to editing another file with all its options set as you saved them For example to save the view of the current file mkview vim main vim You can restore it with source vim main vim 21 6 Modelines When editing a specific file you might set options specifically for that file Typing these commands each time is boring Using a session or view for editing a file doesn t work when sharing the file between s
106. Vim will use the Unix format then because the MS Windows Vim can read and write Unix files but Unix Vim can t read MS Windows format session files Similarly MS Windows Vim understands file names with to separate names but Unix Vim doesn t understand SESSIONS AND VIMINFO Sessions store many things but not the position of marks contents of registers and the command line history You need to use the viminfo feature for these things In most situations you will want to use sessions separately from viminfo This can be used to switch to another session but keep the command line history And yank text into registers in one session and paste it back in another session You might prefer to keep the info with the session You will have to do this yourself then Example mksession vim secret vim wviminfo vim secret viminfo And to restore this again source vim secret vim rviminfo vim secret viminfo 21 5 Views A session stores the looks of the whole of Vim When you want to store the properties for one window only use a view The use of a view is for when you want to edit a file in a specific way For example you have line numbers enabled with the number option and defined a few folds Just like with sessions you can remember this view on the file and restore it later Actually when you store a session it stores the view of each window There are two basic ways to use views The first is to let
107. Windows doesn t have this This is the text that is this assumes you are You can paste this selection in another application without any further action For example a file name argument mouse button in this text select a few words with the mouse switch to Visual mode and highlight the text so that it displays an empty window The selected text will be inserted Vim will Now start another gVim without Click the middle The current selection will only remain valid until some other text is selected in that window After doing the paste in the other gVim now select some characters You will notice that the words that were previously selected in the other gVim window are displayed differently This means that it no longer is the current selection You don t need to select text with the mouse Visual mode works just as well using the keyboard commands for THE REAL CLIPBOARD Now for the other place with which text can be exchanged We call this the real clipboard to avoid confusion Often both the current selection and the real clipboard are called clipboard you ll have to get used to that To put text on the real clipboard select a few different words in one of the gVims you have running Then use the Edit Copy menu entry Now the text has been copied to the real clipboard You can t see this unless you have some application that shows the clipboard contents e g KDE s klipper Now select the o
108. acter To err is human you need a computer To err is human a computer Whether the character under the cursor is included depends on the command you used to move to that character The reference manual calls this exclusive when the character isn t included and inclusive when it is The command moves to the end of a line The dS command deletes from the cursor to the end of the line This is an inclusive motion thus the last character of the line is included in the delete operation To err is human a computer To err is human There is a pattern here operator motion You first type an operator command For example d is the delete operator Then you type a motion command like 41 or w This way you can operate on any text you can move over 25 vim_doc txt Page 26 04 2 Changing text Another operator is c change It acts just like the d operator except it leaves you in Insert mode For example cw changes a word Or more specifically it deletes a word and then puts you in Insert mode To err is human c2wbe lt Esc gt To be human This c2wbe lt Esc gt contains these bits c the change operator 2w move two words they are deleted and Insert mode started be insert this text lt Esc gt back to Normal mode If you have paid attention you will have noticed something strange The space before human isn t deleted There is a saying that for every problem there is an answer that is simp
109. acters are not on the keyboard For example the copyright character To type these characters in Vim you use digraphs where two characters represent one To enter a for example you press three keys CTRL K CO vim_doc txt Page 116 To find out what digraphs are available use the following command digraphs Vim will display the digraph table Here are three lines of it AC gt i159 NS 160 If 7 161 Ct 162 Pa 163 Cu 164 Ye 165 BB 166 SE 167 168 Co 169 a 170 lt 171 NOs 172 173 Rg 174 m7 175 DG 176 177 28 2 178 383 179 This shows for example that the digraph you get by typing CTRL K Pd is the character This is character number 163 decimal Pd is short for Pound Most digraphs are selected to give you a hint about the character they will produce If you look through the list you will understand the logic You can exchange the first and second character if there is no digraph for that combination Thus CTRL K dP also works Since there is no digraph for dP Vim will also search for a Pd digraph The digraphs depend on the character set that Vim assumes you are using On MS DOS they are different from MS Windows Always use digraphs to find out which digraphs are currently available You can define your own digraphs Example digraph a This defines that CTRL K a inserts an a character You can also specify the character with a decimal number
110. ads the original version of the file 02 8 Finding help Everything you always wanted to know can be found in the Vim help files Don t be afraid to ask To get generic help use this command help You could also use the first function key lt Fl gt If your keyboard has a lt Help gt key it might work as well If you don t supply a subject help displays the general help window The creators of Vim did something very clever or very lazy with the help system They made the help window a normal editing window You can use all the normal Vim commands to move through the help information Therefore h j k and 1 move left down up and right To get out of the help window use the same command you use to get out of the editor ZZ This will only close the help window not exit Vim As you read the help text you will notice some text enclosed in vertical bars for example help This indicates a hyperlink If you position the cursor anywhere between the bars and press CTRL jump to tag the help system takes you to the indicated subject For reasons not discussed here the Vim terminology for a hyperlink is tag So CTRL jumps to the location of the tag given by the word under the cursor After a few jumps you might want to go back CTRL T pop tag takes you back to the preceding position CTRL O jump to older position also works nicely here At the top of the help screen there is the notation help txt This
111. al man manl vim 1 rm usr local man manl vimdiff 1 rm usr local man manl vimtutor 1 rm usr local man manl1 xxd 1 MS WINDOWS If you installed Vim with the self installing archive you can run the uninstall gui program located in the same directory as the other Vim programs e g c vim vim6 l You can also launch it from the Start menu if installed the Vim entries there This will remove most of the files menu entries and desktop shortcuts Some files may remain however as they need a Windows restart before being deleted You will be given the option to remove the whole vim directory It probably contains your vimre file and other runtime files that you created so be careful Else if you installed Vim with the zip archives the preferred way is to use the uninstal program note the missing 1 at the end You can find it in the same directory as the install program e g c vim vim6 l1l This should also work from the usual install remove software page However this only removes the registry entries for Vim You have to delete the files yourself Simply select the directory vim vim61 and delete it recursively There should be no files there that you changed but you might want to check that first The vim directory probably contains your vimre file and other runtime files that you created You might want to keep that Table of contents usr_toc txt Copyright see manual copyright
112. all mode prefixes can be found here help context Special keys are enclosed in angle brackets To find help on the up arrow key in Insert mode for instance use this command help 1_ lt Up gt If you see an error message that you don t understand for example E37 No write since last change use to override You can use the error ID at the start to find help about it help E37 Next chapter usr_03 txt Moving around Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 16 usr 03 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 29 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Moving around Before you can insert or delete text the cursor has to be moved to the right place Vim has a large number of commands to position the cursor This chapter shows you how to use the most important ones You can find a list of these commands below Q lr 03 Word movement 03 2 Moving to the start or end of a line 03 3 Moving to a character 03 4 Matching a paren 03 25 Moving to a specific line 03 6 Telling where you are Ose Scrolling around 03 8 Simple searches 03 9 Simple search patterns 03 10 Using marks Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_04 txt Making small changes usr O2 EXt The first steps in Vim usr_toc txt 03 1 Word movement To move the cursor forward one word use the w command Like most Vim commands you can use a numeric prefix to move past multiple words For exa
113. alue will change for many buffers and that is not what a filetype plugin should do vim_doc txt Page 195 When an option has a value that is a list of flags or items consider using and to keep the existing value Be aware that the user may have changed an option value already First resetting to the default value and then changing it often a good idea Example setlocal formatoptions amp formatoptions ro MAPPINGS To make sure mappings will only work in the current buffer use the map lt buffer gt command This needs to be combined with the two step mapping explained above An example of how to define functionality in a filetype plugin if thasmapto lt PlugsJavaImport map lt buffer gt lt unique gt lt LocalLeadersi lt Plug gt JavaImport endif noremap lt buffer gt lt unique gt lt Plug gt JavaImport oimport lt Left gt lt Esc gt hasmapto is used to check if the user has already defined a map to lt Plug gt JavaImport If not then the filetype plugin defines the default mapping This starts with lt LocalLeader gt which allows the user to select the key s he wants filetype plugin mappings to start with The default is a backslash lt unigque gt is used to give an error message if the mapping already exists or overlaps with an existing mapping noremap is used to avoid that any other mappings that the user has defined interferes You might want to use noremap lt script gt to allow
114. ame MATCHING CASE Some languages are not case sensitive case sensitive commands Ssyntax case match such as Pascal Others such as C You need to tell which type you have with the following are vim_doc txt Page 208 Syntax case ignore The match argument means that Vim will match the case of syntax elements Therefore int differs from Int and INT If the ignore argument is used the following are equivalent Procedure PROCEDURE and procedure The syntax case commands can appear anywhere in a syntax file and affect the syntax definitions that follow In most cases you have only one syntax case command in your syntax file if you work with an unusual language that contains both case sensitive and non case sensitive elements however you can scatter the syntax case command throughout the file 44 2 Keywords The most basic syntax elements are keywords To define a keyword use the following form syntax keyword group keyword The group is the name of a syntax group With the highlight command you can assign colors to a group The keyword argument is an actual keyword Here are a few examples Ssyntax keyword xType int long char Syntax keyword xStatement if then else endif This example uses the group names xType and xStatement By convention each group name is prefixed by the filetype for the language being defined This example defines syntax for the x language
115. ames that look like this stdio h font unistd h Sstdlib b And what you want is the following include stdio h include fentl h include unistd h Hinclude stdlib h You start by moving to the first character of the first line Next you execute the following commands qa Start recording a macro in register a Move to the beginning of the line i include lt Esc gt Insert the string include at the beginning of the line Move to the end of the line a lt Esc gt Append the character double quotation mark to the end of the line 5 Go to the next line q Stop recording the macro Now that you have done the work once you can repeat the change by typing the command a three times The a command can be preceded by a count which will cause the macro to be executed that number of times In this case you would type vim_doc txt Page 66 3 a MOVE AND EXECUTE You might have the lines you want to change in various places Just move the cursor to each location and use the a command If you have done that once you can do it again with That s a bit easier to type If you now execute register b with b the next will use register b If you compare the playback method with using there are several differences First of all can only repeat one change As seen in the example above a can do several changes and move around as well Secondly can only remember the last cha
116. an tell Vim to leave it some other place by specifying an offset For the forward search command the offset is specified by appending a slash and the offset default 2 This command searches for the pattern default and then moves to the vim_doc txt Page 131 beginning of the second line past the pattern Using this command on the paragraph above Vim finds the word default in the first line Then the cursor is moved two lines down and lands on an offset If the offset is a simple number the cursor will be placed at the beginning of the line that many lines from the match The offset number can be positive or negative If it is positive the cursor moves down that many lines if negative it moves up CHARACTER OFFSETS The e offset indicates an offset from the end of the match It moves the cursor onto the last character of the match The command const e puts the cursor on the t of const From that position adding a number moves forward that many characters This command moves to the character just after the match const e 1 A positive number moves the cursor to the right a negative number moves it to the left For example const e 1 moves the cursor to the s of const If the offset begins with b the cursor moves to the beginning of the pattern That s not very useful since leaving out the b does the same thing It does get useful when a number is added or subtracted The cursor then goes f
117. and for your filetype Autocommands were explained in section 40 3 Example augroup filetypedetect au BufNewFile BufRead xyz setf xyz augroup END This will recognize all files that end in xyz as the xyz filetype The augroup commands put this autocommand in the filetypedetect group This allows removing all autocommands for filetype detection when doing filetype off The setf command will set the filetype option to its argument unless it was set already This will make sure that filetype isn t set twice You can use many different patterns to match the name of your file Directory names can also be included See autocmd patterns For example the files under usr share scripts are all ruby files but don t have the expected file name extension Adding this to the example above augroup filetypedetect au BufNewFile BufRead xyz setfi xyz au BufNewFile BufRead usr share scripts setf ruby augroup END However if you now edit a file usr share scripts README txt this is not a ruby file The danger of a pattern ending in is that it quickly matches too many files To avoid trouble with this put the filetype vim file in another directory one that is at the end of runtimepath For Unix for example you could use vim after filetype vim You now put the detection of text files in vim filetype vim augroup filetypedetect au BufNewFile BufRead txt setf text augroup END That file is found
118. and to be executed EVENTS One of the most useful events is BufReadPost It is triggered after a new file is being edited It is commonly used to set option values For example you know that gsm files are GNU assembly language To get the syntax file right define this autocommand autocmd BufReadPost gsm set filetype asm If Vim is able to detect the type of file it will set the filetype option for you This triggers the Filetype event Use this to do something when a certain type of file is edited For example to load a list of abbreviations for text files autocmd Filetype text source vim abbrevs vim When starting to edit a new file you could make Vim insert a skeleton autocmd BufNewFile ch Oread skeletons skel c See autocmd events for a complete list of events PATTERNS The file pattern argument can actually be a comma separated list of file patterns For example c h matches files ending in c and h The usual file wildcards can be used Here is a summary of the most often used ones Match any character any number of times Match any character once abc Match the character a b or c Matches a dot a b c Matches ab and ac When the pattern includes a slash Vim will compare directory names Without the slash only the last part of a file name is used For example txt matches home biep readme txt The pattern home biep would also match it But home foo txt would
119. ar Splitting windows Display two different files above each other Or view two locations in the file at the same time See the difference between two files by putting them side by side All this is possible with split windows 08 1 Split a window 08 2 Split a window on another file 08 3 Window size 08 4 Vertical splits 08 5 Moving windows 08 6 Commands for all windows 08 7 Viewing differences with vimdiff 08 8 Various Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 09 txt Using the GUI usr O7 EX Editing more than one file usr tod txt 08 1 Split a window The easiest way to open a new window is to use the following command Teplie This command splits the screen into two windows and leaves the cursor in the top one file one c one c file one c one c What you see here is two windows on the same file The line with is that status line It displays information about the window above it In practice the status line will be in reverse video The two windows allow you to view two parts of the same file For example you could make the top window show the variable declarations of a program and the bottom one the code that uses these variables The CTRL W w command can be used to jump between the windows If you are in the top window CTRL W w jumps to the window below it If you are in the bottom window it will jump to the first window CTR
120. arts with one simple command Syntax enable That should work in most situations to get color in your files Vim will automagically detect the type of file and load the right syntax highlighting Suddenly comments are blue keywords brown and strings red This makes it easy to overview the file After a while you will find that black amp white text slows you down If you always want to use syntax highlighting put the syntax enable command in your vimrc file If you want syntax highlighting only when the terminal supports colors you can put this in your vimrc file IE amp 6 Co 1 syntax enable endif If you want syntax highlighting only in the GUI version put the syntax enable command in your gvimrc file 06 2 No or wrong colors There can be a number of reasons why you don t see colors Your terminal does not support colors Vim will use bold italic and underlined text but this doesn t look very nice You probably will want to try to get a terminal with colors For Unix I recommend the xterm from the XFree86 project xfree xterm Your terminal does support colors but Vim doesn t know this Make sure your STERM setting is correct For example when using an xterm that supports colors setenv TERM xterm color or depending on your shell TERM xterm color export TERM The terminal name must match the terminal you are using If it still doesn t work have a look at xterm color which shows a
121. at contains both tabs and other characters Use rx on the first tab inp 0 693 0 534 0 693 rx V inpx0 693 0 534 0 693 The layout is messed up To avoid that use the gr command inp 0 693 0 534 0 693 grx V inpx 0 693 0 534 0 693 What happens is that the gr command makes sure the new character takes the right amount of screen space Extra spaces or tabs are inserted to fill the gap Thus what actually happens is that a tab is replaced by x and then blanks added to make the text after it keep it s place In this case a tab is inserted When you need to replace more than one character you use the R command to go to Replace mode see 04 9 This messes up the layout and replaces the wrong characters inp 0 0 534 0 693 RO 786 V inp 0 78634 0 693 The gR command uses Virtual Replace mode This preserves the layout inp 0 0 534 0 693 gRO 786 V inp 0 786 0 534 0 693 Next chapter usr_26 txt Repeating Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 125 usr 26 CxE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 29 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Repeating An editing task is hardly ever unstructured A change often needs to be made several times In this chapter a number of useful ways to repeat a change will be explained 26 51 Repeating with Visual mode 26 12 Add and subtract 26 3 Making a change in many files 26 4 Using Vim from a shell script Next chapter Previous chapter Table of
122. ated three times for a total of six words REPLACING WITH ONE CHARACTER The r command is not an operator It waits for you to type a character and will replace the character under the cursor with it You could do the same with cl or with the s command but with r you don t have to press lt Esc gt there is somerhing grong here ET rE rw There is something wrong here vim_doc txt Page 27 Using a count with r causes that many characters to be replaced with the same character Example There is something wrong here 5rx There is something xxxxx here To replace a character with a line break use r lt Enter gt This deletes one character and inserts a line break Using a count here only applies to the number of characters deleted 4r lt Enter gt replaces four characters with one line break 04 3 Repeating a change The command is one of the most simple yet powerful commands in Vim It repeats the last change For instance suppose you are editing an HTML file and want to delete all the lt B gt tags You position the cursor on the first lt and delete the lt B gt with the command df gt You then go to the lt of the next lt B gt and kill it using the command The command executes the last change command in this case df gt To delete another tag position the cursor on the lt and use the command To lt B gt generate lt B gt a table of lt B gt contents f lt find fi
123. atements are as vim_doc txt Page 214 follows syntax include Pod lt sfile gt p h pod vim syntax region perlPOD start head end cut contains Pod When head is found in a Perl file the perlPOD region starts In this region the Pod cluster is contained All the items defined as top level items in the pod vim syntax files will match here When cut is found the region ends and we go back to the items defined in the Perl file The syntax include command is clever enough to ignore a syntax clear command in the included file And an argument such as contains ALL will only contain items defined in the included file not in the file that includes it The lt sfile gt p h part uses the name of the current file lt sfile gt expands it to a full path p and then takes the head h This results in the directory name of the file This causes the pod vim file in the same directory to be included 44 10 Synchronizing Compilers have it easy They start at the beginning of a file and parse it straight through Vim does not have it so easy It must start in the middle where the editing is being done So how does it tell where it is The secret is the syntax sync command This tells Vim how to figure out where it is For example the following command tells Vim to scan backward for the beginning or end of a C style comment and begin syntax coloring from there syntax sync ccomment You can tune this pr
124. ations will be presented This uses the commands introduced in the previous chapters and a few more T21 Replace a word 12 2 Change Last First to First Last 12 3 Sort a list 124 Reverse line order 12 5 Count words T26 Find a man page 1227 Trim blanks 12 28 Find where a word is used Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 20 txt Typing command line commands quickly usr 11 txt Recovering from a crash usr_toc txt 12 1 Replace a word The substitute command can be used to replace all occurrences of a word with another word s four 4 g The range means to replace in all lines The g flag at the end causes all words in a line to be replaced This will not do the right thing if your file also contains thirtyfour It would be replaced with thirty4 To avoid this use the lt item to match the start of a word 8 lt four 4 g Obviously this still goes wrong on fourty Use gt to match the end of a word s lt four gt 4 g If you are programming you might want to replace four in comments but not in the code Since this is difficult to specify add the c flag to have the substitute command prompt you for each replacement 8 lt four gt 4 ge REPLACING IN SEVERAL FILES Suppose you want to replace a word in more than one file You could edit each file and type the command manually It s a lot faster to use record and playback Let s assume you h
125. ave a directory with C files all ending in cpp There is a function called GetResp that you want to rename to GetAnswer vim cpp Start Vim defining the argument list to contain all the C files You are now in the first file qq Start recording into the q register 8 lt GetResp gt GetAnswer g Do the replacements in the first file wnext Write this file and move to the next one q Stop recording q Execute the q register This will replay the substitution and wnext You can verify that this doesn t produce an error message 999 q Execute the q register on the remaining files vim_doc txt Page 82 At the last file you will get an error message because wnext cannot move to the next file This stops the execution and everything is done When playing back a recorded sequence an error stops the execution Therefore make sure you don t get an error message when recording There is one catch If one of the cpp files does not contain the word GetResp you will get an error and replacing will stop To avoid this add the e flag to the substitute command 38 lt GetResp gt GetAnswer ge The e flag tells substitute that not finding a match is not an error 12 2 Change Last First to First Last You have a list of names in this form Doe John Smith Peter You want to change that to John Doe Peter Smith This can be done with just one command Saf yil sls Vet A Let s
126. ax off This will completely disable syntax highlighting and remove it immediately for all buffers syn manual If you want syntax highlighting only for specific files use this syntax manual This will enable the syntax highlighting but not switch it on automatically when starting to edit a buffer To switch highlighting on for the current buffer set the syntax option set syntax ON vim_doc txt Page 45 06 5 Printing with colors syntax printing In the MS Windows version you can print the current file with this command hardcopy You will get the usual printer dialog where you can select the printer and a few settings If you have a color printer the paper output should look the same as what you see inside Vim But when you use a dark background the colors will be adjusted to look good on white paper There are several options that change the way Vim prints printdevice printheader printfont printoptions To print only a range of lines use Visual mode to select the lines and then type the command v100j hardcopy y starts Visual mode 1003 moves a hundred lines down they will be highlighted Then hardcopy will print those lines You can use other commands to move in Visual mode of course This also works on Unix if you have a PostScript printer Otherwise you will have to do a bit more work You need to convert the text to HTML first and then print it from a web browser such as Netscap
127. bar and popup menus filetypes Plugins for a filetype Adding a filetype jusr_44 txt Your own syntax highlighted 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 44 WOANHDUAFWNEH 10 LI 12 Basic syntax commands Keywords Matches Regions Nested items Following groups Other arguments Clusters Including another syntax file Synchronizing Installing a syntax file Portable syntax file layout usr_45 txt Select your language 45 45 45 45 45 OP WNH Language for Messages Language for Menus Using another encoding Editing files with a different encoding Entering language text Making Vim Run Before you can use Vim jusr_90 txt Installing Vim 90 90 90 90 90 3 Ppl 2 3 4 5 Unix MS Windows Upgrading Common installation issues Uninstalling Vim Copyright see manual copyright Page 5 vim_doc txt Page 6 tusr 01 txKE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Jan 12 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar About the manuals This chapter introduces the manuals available with Vim Read this to know the conditions under which the commands are explained Ona Two manuals Ol 2 Vim installed 01 3 Using the Vim tutor 01 4 Copyright Next chapter usr_02 txt The first steps in Vim Table of contents usr_ toc txt 01 1 Two manuals The Vim documentation consists of two parts 1 The User manual Task oriented explanations from simple to co
128. break this down in parts Obviously it starts with a substitute command The is the line range which stands for the whole file Thus the substitution is done in every line in the file The arguments for the substitute command are from to The slashes separate the from pattern and the to string This is what the from pattern contains VCD 3X02 Ae The first part between matches Last match anything but a comma any number of times matches literally i The second part between matches First any character any number of times In the to part we have 2 and 1 These are called backreferences They refer to the text matched by the parts in the pattern 2 refers to the text matched by the second which is the First name 1 refers to the first which is the Last name You can use up to nine backreferences in the to part of a substitute command 0 stands for the whole matched pattern There are a few more special items in a substitute command see sub replace special 12 3 Sort a list In a Makefile you often have a list of files For example OBJS version o peh o getopt o uilo getoptl o inp o patch o backup o To sort this list filter the text through the external sort command vim_doc txt Page 83 OBJS ref Sf HL Isort This goes to the first line where OBJS is the first thing in the line Then it go
129. but what happens if you want to add stuff to the end of the line For that you need to insert the a append command For example to change the line and that s not saying much to and that s not saying much move the cursor over to the dot at text after the cursor This is done with for the turtle for the turtle the end of the line Then type x to delete the period e in turtle The cursor is now positioned at the end of the line on the Now type a ll lt Esc gt to append three exclamation points after the e in turtle and that s not saying much for the turtle OPENING UP A NEW LINE The o command creates a new empty line below the cursor and puts Vim in Insert mode Then you can type the text for the new line Suppose the cursor is somewhere in the first of these two lines A very intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle o If you now use the command and type new text oThat liked using Vim lt Esc gt The result is A very intelligent turtle That liked using Vim Found programming UNIX a hurdle The O command uppercase opens a line above the cursor USING A COUNT Suppose you want to move up nine lines You can type kkkkkkkkk or you can enter the command 9k In fact you can precede many commands with a number Earlier in this chapter for instance you added three exclamation points to the end of a line by typing a lt Esc gt Another way to do this is to use the com
130. c txt Page 142 set foldexpr lt Tab gt Where lt Tab gt is a real Tab Vim will fill in the previous value which you can then edit More about folding by expression in the reference manual fold expr 28 9 Folding unchanged lines This is useful when you set the diff option in the same window The vimdiff command does this for you Example setlocal diff foldmethod diff scrollbind nowrap foldlevel 1 Do this in every window that shows a different version of the same file You will clearly see the differences between the files while the text that didn t change is folded For more details see fold diff 28 10 Which fold method to use All these possibilities makes you wonder which method you should chose Unfortunately there is no golden rule Here are some hints If there is a syntax file with folding for the language you are editing that is probably the best choice If there isn t one you might try to write it This requires a good knowledge of search patterns It s not easy but when it s working you will not have to define folds manually Typing commands to manually fold regions can be used for unstructured text Then use the mkview command to save and restore your folds The marker method requires you to change the file If you are sharing the files with other people or you have to meet company standards you might not be allowed to add them The main advantage of markers is that you can put t
131. can find all files in the file system For example type u and CTRL X CTRL F This will match usr this is on Unix the file is found in usr If you now press CTRL N you go back to u Instead to accept the usr and go one directory level deeper use CTRL X CTRL F again the file is found in usr X11R6 The results depend on what is found in your file system of course The matches are sorted alphabetically 24 4 Repeating an insert If you press CTRL A the editor inserts the text you typed the last time you were in Insert mode Assume for example that you have a file that begins with the following file h Main program begins You edit this file by inserting include at the beginning of the first line include file h Main program begins Al You go down to the beginning of the next line using the commands j You now start to insert a new include line So you type i CTRL A The result is as follows include file h include Main program begins The include was inserted because CTRL A inserts the text of the previous insert Now you type main h lt Enter gt to finish the line include file h include main h Main program begins The CTRL command does a CTRL A and then exits Insert mode That s a quick way of doing exactly the same insertion again 24 5 Copying from another line The CTRL Y command inserts the character above the cursor
132. ckup files end with you can change the extension set backupext bak This will use data txt bak instead of data txt Another option that matters here is backupdir It specifies where the backup file is written The default to write the backup in the same directory as the original file will mostly be the right thing When the backup option isn t set but the writebackup is Vim will still create a backup file However it is deleted as soon as writing the file was completed successfully This functions as a safety against losing your original file when writing fails in some way disk full is the most common cause being hit by lightning might be vim_doc txt Page 50 another although less common KEEPING THE ORIGINAL FILE If you are editing source files you might want to keep the file before you make any changes But the backup file will be overwritten each time you write the file Thus it only contains the previous version not the first one To make Vim keep the original file set the patchmode option This specifies the extension used for the first backup of a changed file Usually you would do this set patchmode orig When you now edit the file data txt for the first time make changes and write the file Vim will keep a copy of the unchanged file under the name data txt orig If you make further changes to the file Vim will notice that data txt orig already exists and leave it alone Further backup files
133. command is limited by the amount of text that is there so if there is less than a shift amount of whitespace available it removes what it can JOINING LINES The J command joins all selected lines together into one line Thus it removes the line breaks Actually the line break leading white space and trailing white space is replaced by one space Two spaces are used after a line ending that can be changed with the joinspaces option Let s use the example that we got so familiar with now The result of using the J command This is a long line short Any other long line The J command doesn t require a blockwise selection It works with v and Vv selection in exactly the same way If you don t want the white space to be changed use the gJ command 10 6 Reading and writing part of a file When you are writing an e mail message you may want to include another file This can be done with the read filename command The text of the file is put below the cursor line Starting with this text Hi John Here is the diff that fixes the bug Bye Pierre Move the cursor to the second line and type read patch The file named patch will be inserted with this result Hi John Here is the diff that fixes the bug 202 lt for i 0 1 lt length i ES for i 0 i lt length 41 Bye Pierre The read command accepts a range The file will be put below the last line number of this range Thus
134. commands jusr_01 txt usr_02 txt About oL The first Q2 MPA 02 02 02 02 O23 O2 OAs 01 2 3 01 4 the manuals Al AIAHRAUNAWNH Two manuals Vim installed Using the Vim tutor Copyright steps in Vim Running Vim for the First Time Inserting text Moving around Deleting characters Undo and Redo Other editing commands Getting out Finding help Page 1 vim_doc txt jusr_03 txt jusr_04 txt jusr_05 txt jusr_06 txt jusr_07 txt usr_08 txt usr_09 txt usr_10 txt Moving around 03 03 033 03 033 OSs 03 03 O3 03 3 HKEUO ONAUNBABUWNE oO Word movement Moving to the start or end of a line Moving to a character Matching a paren Moving to a specific line Telling where you are Scrolling around Simple searches Simple search patterns Using marks Making small changes 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 FPuoODIYIAHAUPFWNE oO Operators and motions Changing text Repeating a change Visual mode Moving text Copying text Using the clipboard Text objects Replace mode Conclusion Set your settings Using 06 06 06 06 06 06 05 1 05a 05 05 05 OS 05 NAW PWD Editing Using ANIAHAUUFAFWNHE 09 OS 09 09 OTL OT OF OTa OTs OT OTa AeAwWwNEe ct g 0 The vimre file The example vimre file explained Simple mappings Adding a plugin Adding
135. contents usr _27 txt Search commands and patterns usr 25 txt Editing formatted text usr toc txt 26 1 Repeating with Visual mode Visual mode is very handy for making a change in any sequence of lines You can see the highlighted text thus you can check if the correct lines are changed But making the selection takes some typing The gv command selects the same area again This allows you to do another operation on the same text Suppose you have some lines where you want to change 2001 to 2002 and 2000 to 2001 The financial results for 2001 are better than for 2000 The income increased by 50 even though 2001 had more rain than 2000 2000 2001 income 45 403 66 234 First change 2001 to 2002 Select the lines in Visual mode and use 3 2001 2002 g Now use gv to reselect the same text It doesn t matter where the cursor is Then use s 2000 2001 g to make the second change Obviously you can repeat these changes several times 26 2 Add and subtract When repeating the change of one number into another you often have a fixed offset In the example above one was added to each year Instead of typing a substitute command for each year that appears the CTRL A command can be used Using the same text as above search for a year 19 0 9 0 9 20 0 9 0 9 Now press CTRL A The year will be increased by one The financial results for 2002 are better than for 2000 The income in
136. creased by 50 even though 2001 had more rain than 2000 2000 2001 income 45 403 66 234 Use n to find the next year and press to repeat the CTRL A is a bit quicker to type Repeat n and for all years that appear Hint set the hlsearch option to see the matches you are going to change then you can look ahead and do it faster Adding more than one can be done by prepending the number to CTRL A Suppose you have this list 1 item four vim_doc txt Page 126 2 item five 3 item six Move the cursor to 1 and type 3 CTRL A The 1 will change to 4 Again you can use to repeat this on the other numbers Another example 006 foo bar 007 foo bar Using CTRL A on these numbers results in 007 foo bar 010 foo bar 7 plus one is 10 What happened here is that Vim recognized 007 as an octal number because there is a leading zero This notation is often used in C programs If you do not want a number with leading zeros to be handled as octal use this set nrformats octal The CTRL X command does subtraction in a similar way 26 3 Making a change in many files Suppose you have a variable called x cnt and you want to change it to x counter This variable is used in several of your C files You need to change it in all files This is how you do it Put all the relevant files in the argument list args c This finds all C files and edits the first one Now you can perf
137. cter classes 27 38 Matching a line break 27 9 Examples usr_28 txt Folding 26 51 What is folding 28 2 Manual folding 28 3 Working with folds 28 4 Saving and restoring folds 28 5 Folding by indent 28 6 Folding with markers 287 Folding by syntax 28 8 Folding by expression 28 9 Folding unchanged lines 28 10 Which fold method to use Jusr_29 txt Moving through programs 291 Using tags 292 The preview window 293 Moving through a program 29 4 Finding global identifiers 29 5 Finding local identifiers usr_30 txt Editing programs 30 1 Compiling 30 2 Indenting C files 30 3 Automatic indenting 30 4 Other indenting 30 5 Tabs and spaces 30 6 Formatting comments usr_31 txt Exploiting the GUI olei The file browser alle Confirmation 21 3 Menu shortcuts 31 4 Vim window position and size a3 5 Various Tuning Vim Make Vim work as you like it jusr_40 txt Make new commands 40 1 Key mapping 40 2 Defining command line commands 40 3 Autocommands jusr_41 txt Write a Vim script 41 1 Introduction 41 2 Variables 41 3 Expressions 41 4 Conditionals 41 5 Executing an expression 41 6 Using functions 41 7 Defining a function 41 8 Various remarks 41 9 Writing a plugin 41 10 Writing a filetype plugin 41 11 Writing a compiler plugin Page 4 vim_doc txt jusr_42 txt Add new menus 42 42 42 42 jusr_43 txt Using 43 43 oak 2 23 4 sl 42 Introduction Menu commands Various Tool
138. ction check if a cscope connection exists did_filetype check if a FileType autocommand was used eventhandler check if invoked by an event handler getwinposx X position of the GUI Vim window getwinposy Y position of the GUI Vim window winheight get height of a specific window winwidth get width of a specific window libcall call a function in an external library libcallnr idem returning a number 41 7 Defining a function Vim enables you to define your own functions The basic function declaration begins as follows function name varl var2 body endfuncetion Function names must begin with a capital letter Let s define a short function to return the smaller of two numbers It starts with this line function Min numi num2 This tells Vim that the function is named Min and it takes two arguments numi and num2 The first thing you need to do is to check to see which number is smaller if a numl lt a num2 The special prefix a tells Vim that the variable is a function argument Let s assign the variable smaller the value of the smallest number if a numl lt a num2 let smaller a numl else let smaller a num2 endif The variable smaller is a local variable Variables used inside a function are local unless prefixed by something like g a or S To access a global variable from inside a function you must prepend g to it Thus g count inside
139. current window and jump to the tag under the cursor use this command CTRL W If a count is specified the new window will be that many lines high MORE TAGS FILES When you have files in many directories you can create a tags file in each of them Vim will then only be able to jump to tags within that directory To find more tags files set the tags option to include all the relevant tags files Example set tags tags tags tags This finds a tags file in the same directory as the current file one directory level higher and in all subdirectories This is quite a number of tags files but it may still not be enough For example when editing a file in proj srce you will not find the tags file proj sub tags For this situation Vim offers to search a whole directory tree for tags files Example set tags proj tags ONE TAGS FILE When Vim has to search many places for tags files you can hear the disk rattling It may get a bit slow In that case it s better to spend this time while generating one big tags file You might do this overnight This requires the Exuberant ctags program mentioned above It offers an argument to search a whole directory tree vim_doc txt Page 145 cd proj ctags R The nice thing about this is that Exuberant ctags recognizes various file types Thus this doesn t work just for C and C programs also for Eiffel and even Vim scripts See the ctags documentation to tune t
140. d can take a count whose default is number The resulting count can be used through the lt count gt keyword bang You can use a If present using lt bang gt will result ina register You can specify a register The default is the unnamed register The register specification is available as lt reg gt a k a lt register gt complete type Type of command line completion used See command completion for the list of possible values bar The command can be followed by and another command or and a comment buffer The command is only available for the current buffer Finally you have the lt lt gt keyword It stands for the character lt Use this to escape the special meaning of the lt gt items mentioned REDEFINING AND DELETING To redefine the same command use the argument command nargs Say echo lt args gt command nargs Say echo lt q args gt To delete a user command use delcommand It takes a single argument which is the name of the command Example delcommand SavelIt To delete all the user commands comclear Careful this can t be undone More details about all this in the reference manual user commands 40 3 Autocommands An autocommand is a command that is executed automatically in response to some event such as a file being read or written or a buffer change Through the use of autocommands you can train Vim to edit compressed files for exampl
141. d option values are like before What exactly is restored depends on the sessionoptions option The default value is blank buffers curdir folds help options winsize blank keep empty windows buffers all buffers not only the ones in a window curdir the current directory folds folds also manually created ones help the help window options all options and mappings winsize window sizes Change this to your liking To also restore the size of the Vim window for example use set sessionoptions resize SESSION HERE SESSION THERE The obvious way to use sessions is when working on different projects Suppose you store you session files in the directory vim You are currently working on the Secret project and have to switch to the boring project wall mksession vim secret vim source vim boring vim This first uses wall to write all modified files Then the current session is saved using mksession This overwrites the previous session The next time you load the secret session you can continue where you were at this point And finally you load the new boring session If you open help windows split and close various window and generally mess up the window layout you can go back to the last saved session source vim boring vim Thus you have complete control over whether you want to continue next time where you are now by saving the current setup in a session or keep the session file as a s
142. de and back is mostly free of this problem unless there are illegal characters Conversion from Unicode to other encodings often loses information when there was more than one language in the file 45 5 Entering language text Computer keyboards don t have much more than a hundred keys Some languages have thousands of characters Unicode has ten thousands So how do you type these characters First of all when you don t use too many of the special characters you can use digraphs This was already explained in 24 9 When you use a language that uses many more characters than keys on your keyboard you will want to use an Input Method IM This requires learning the translation from typed keys to resulting character When you need an IM you probably already have one on your system It should work with Vim like with other programs For details see mbyte XIM for the X Window system and mbyte IME for MS Windows KEYMAPS For some languages the character set is different from latin but uses a similar number of characters It s possible to map keys to characters Vim uses keymaps for this Suppose you want to type hebrew You can load the keymap like this set keymap hebrew Vim will try to find a keymap file for you This depends on the value of encoding If no matching file was found you will get an error message Now you can type Hebrew in Insert mode In Normal mode and when typing a command Vim automatically sw
143. ding Folding is used to show a range of lines in the buffer as a single line on the screen Like a piece of paper which is folded to make it shorter line 1 line 2 line 3 folded lines line 12 line 13 line 14 The text is still in the buffer unchanged Only the way lines are displayed is affected by folding The advantage of folding is that you can get a better overview of the structure of text by folding lines of a section and replacing it with a line that indicates that there is a section 28 2 Manual folding Try it out Position the cursor in a paragraph and type zfap You will see that the paragraph is replaced by a highlighted line You have created a fold zf is an operator and ap a text object selection You can use the zf operator with any movement command to create a fold for the text that it moved over zf also works in Visual mode To view the text again open the fold by typing ZO And you can close the fold again with ZC vim_doc txt Page 138 All the folding commands start with z With some fantasy this looks like a folded piece of paper seen from the side The letter after the z has a mnemonic meaning to make it easier to remember the commands zf F old creation ZO O pen a fold ZC C lose a fold Folds can be nested A region of text that contains folds can be folded again For example you can fold each paragraph in this section and then
144. dit i Then it starts all over again Thus Vim cycles through the list of matches Use CTRL P to go through the list in the other direction lt lt Tab gt lt Tab gt gt lt Tab gt gt edit i edit info txt edit intro txt lt CTRL P lt CTRL P CTRL P gt CONTEXT When you type set i instead of edit i and press lt Tab gt you get Bet icon vim_doc txt Page 89 Hey why didn t you get set info txt That s because Vim has context sensitive completion The kind of words Vim will look for depends on the command before it Vim knows that you cannot use a file name just after a set command but you can use an option name Again if you repeat typing the lt Tab gt Vim will cycle through all matches There are quite a few it s better to type more characters first set isk lt Tab gt Gives set iskeyword Now type and press lt Tab gt set iskeyword 48 57 192 255 What happens here is that Vim inserts the old value of the option Now you can edit it What is completed with lt Tab gt is what Vim expects in that place Just try it out to see how it works In some situations you will not get what you want That s either because Vim doesn t know what you want or because completion was not implemented for that situation In that case you will get a lt Tab gt inserted displayed as I LIST MATCHES When there are many matches you would like to see an overview Do this by
145. don t want an error message when it doesn t append unlet s count When a script finishes the local variables used there will not be automatically freed The next time the script executes it can still use the old value Example if lexaete s call count let s call count endif let s call count B call count 1 echo called s call count times The exists function checks if a variable has already been defined Its argument is the name of the variable you want to check Not the variable itself If you would do this LE lexists s call count Then the value of s call_count will be used as the name of the variable that exists checks That s not what you want The exclamation mark negates a value When the value was true it becomes false When it was false it becomes true You can read it as not Thus if exists can be read as if not exists What Vim calls true is anything that is not zero Only zero is false STRING VARIABLES AND CONSTANTS So far only numbers were used for the variable value Strings can be used as well Numbers and strings are the only two types of variables that Vim supports The type is dynamic it is set each time when assigning a value to the variable with let To assign a string value to a variable you need to use a string constant There are two types of these First the string in double quotes let name peter echo name peter If you want to include
146. e Convert the current file to HTML with this command source SVIMRUNTIME syntax 2html vim You will see it crunching away this can take quite a while for a large file Some time later another window shows the HTML code Now write this somewhere doesn t matter where you throw it away later write main c html Open this file in your favorite browser and print it from there If all goes well the output should look exactly as it does in Vim See 2html vim for details Don t forget to delete the HTML file when you are done with it Instead of printing you could also put the HTML file on a web server and let others look at the colored text 06 6 Further reading usr _44 txt Your own syntax highlighted syntax All the details Next chapter usr_07 txt Editing more than one file Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 46 usr 07 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 19 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Editing more than one file No matter how many files you have you can edit them without leaving Vim Define a list of files to work on and jump from one to the other Copy text from one file and put it in another one O71 Edit another file OF 2 A list of files 07 3 Jumping from file to file 07 4 Backup files 07 5 Copy text between files 07 26 Viewing a file O77 Changing the file name Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 08 txt Splitting windows usr_
147. e That is used in the gzip plugin Autocommands are very powerful Use them with care and they will help you avoid typing many commands Use them carelessly and they will cause a lot of trouble Suppose you want to replace a date stamp on the end of a file every time it is written First you define a function function DateInsert Sdelete read date endfunction vim_doc txt Page 171 You want this function to be called each time just before a file is written This will make that happen autocmd FileWritePre call DateInsert FileWritePre is the event for which this autocommand is triggered Just before pre writing a file The is a pattern to match with the file name In this case it matches all files With this command enabled when you do a write Vim checks for any matching FileWritePre autocommands and executes them and then it performs the write The general form of the autocmd command is as follows autocmd group events file pattern nested command The group name is optional It is used in managing and calling the commands more on this later The events parameter is a list of events comma separated that trigger the command file pattern is a filename usually with wildcards For example using txt makes the autocommand be used for all files whose name end in txt The optional nested flag allows for nesting of autocommands see below and finally command is the comm
148. e The must be white space before vim or vim must be at the start of the line Thus using something like gvim will not work The part between the colons is a set command It works the same way as typing the set command except that you need to insert a backslash before a colon otherwise it would be seen as the end of the modeline Another example vim set textwidth 72 dir c tmp use c tmp here There is an extra backslash before the first colon so that it s included in the set command The text after the second colon is ignored thus a remark can be placed there For more details see modeline Next chapter usr_22 txt Finding the file to edit Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 99 tusr 22 CeE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Mar 17 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Finding the file to edit Files can be found everywhere So how do you find them Vim offers various ways to browse the directory tree There are commands to jump to a file that is mentioned in another And Vim remembers which files have been edited before 22L The file explorer 22 2 The current directory 2233 Finding a file 22 4 The buffer list Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 23 Exe Editing other files usr 21 EXE Go away and come back usr_toc txt 22 1 The file explorer Vim has a plugin that makes it possible to edit a directory Try this edit Through the ma
149. e n several times You will move to each include in the text You can also use a count if you know which match you want Thus 3n finds the third match Using a count with doesn t work The command works like but searches backwards word The N command repeats the last search the opposite direction Thus using N after a command search backwards using N after searches forward IGNORING CASE Normally you have to type exactly what you want to find If you don t care about upper or lowercase in a word set the ignorecase option set ignorecase If you now search for word it will also match Word and WORD To match case again vim_doc txt Page 21 set noignorecase HISTORY Suppose you do three searches one two three Now let s start searching by typing a simple without pressing lt Enter gt If you press lt Up gt the cursor key Vim puts three on the command line Pressing lt Enter gt at this point searches for three If you do not press lt Enter gt but press lt Up gt instead Vim changes the prompt to two Another press of lt Up gt moves you to one You can also use the lt Down gt cursor key to move through the history of search commands in the other direction If you know what a previously used pattern starts with and you want to use it again type that character before pressing lt Up gt With the previous example you can type o lt Up gt and Vim will
150. e to save the current setup as the third view and load the second view mkview 3 loadview 2 Note that when you insert or delete lines the views might become invalid Also check out the viewdir option which specifies where the views are stored You might want to delete old views now and then 28 5 Folding by indent Defining folds with zf is a lot of work If your text is structured by giving lower level items a larger indent you can use the indent folding method This will create folds for every sequence of lines with the same indent Lines with a larger indent will become nested folds This works well with many programming languages vim_doc txt Page 140 Try this by setting the foldmethod option set foldmethod indent Then you can use the zm and zr commands to fold more and reduce folding It s easy to see on this example text This line is not indented This line is indented once This line is indented twice This line is indented twice This line is indented once This line is not indented This line is indented once This line is indented once Note that the relation between the amount of indent and the fold depth depends on the shiftwidth option Each shiftwidth worth of indent adds one to the depth of the fold This is called a fold level When you use the zr and zm commands you actually increase or decrease the foldlevel option You could also set it directly set foldlevel 3 This means tha
151. e BufRead foo set filetype foofoo Write this single line file as ftdetect foofoo vim in the first directory that appears in runtimepath For Unix that would be vim ftdetect foofoo vim The convention is to use the name of the filetype for the script name You can make more complicated checks if you like for example to inspect the contents of the file to recognize the language Also see new filetype SUMMARY plugin special Summary of special things to use in a plugin s name Variables local to the script vim_doc txt Page 194 lt SID gt Script ID used for mappings and functions local to the script hasmapto Function to test if the user already defined a mapping for functionality the script offers lt Leader gt Value of mapleader which the user defines as the keys that plugin mappings start with map lt unique gt Give a warning if a mapping already exists noremap lt script gt Use only mappings local to the script not global mappings exists Cmd Check if a user command already exists 41 11 Writing a filetype plugin write filetype plugin ftplugin A filetype plugin is like a global plugin except that it sets options and defines mappings for the current buffer only See add filetype plugin for how this type of plugin is used First read the section on global plugins above 41 10 All that is said there also applies to filetype plugins There are a few extras which are explained
152. e done with qC word lt Enter gt q You start with qC which records to the c register and appends Thus writing to an uppercase register name means to append to the register with the same letter but lowercase This works both with recording and with yank and delete commands For example you want to collect a sequence of lines into the a register Yank the first line with aY Now move to the second line and type AY Repeat this command for all lines The a register now contains all those lines in the order you yanked them 10 2 Substitution vim_doc txt Page 67 The substitute command enables you to perform string replacements on a whole range of lines The general form of this command is as follows range substitute from to flags This command changes the from string to the to string in the lines specified with range For example you can change Professor to Teacher in all lines with the following command ssubstitute Professor Teacher The substitute command is almost never spelled out completely Most of the time people use the abbreviated version s From here on the abbreviation will be used The before the command specifies the command works on all lines Without a range s only works on the current line More about ranges in the next section By default the substitute command changes only the first occurrence on each line For example the preceding command changes the line
153. e example plugin is at the end vim_doc txt Page 189 BODY Let s start with the body of the plugin the lines that do the actual work 14 iabbrev teh the 15 iabbrev otehr other 16 iabbrev wnat want 17 iabbrev synchronisation 18 synchronization 19 let s count 4 The actual list should be much longer of course The line numbers have only been added to explain a few things don t put them in your plugin file HEADER You will probably add new corrections to the plugin and soon have several versions laying around And when distributing this file people will want to know who wrote this wonderful plugin and where they can send remarks Therefore put a header at the top of your plugin 1 Vim global plugin for correcting typing mistakes 2 Last Change 2000 Oct 15 3 Maintainer Bram Moolenaar lt Bram vim org gt About copyright and licensing Since plugins are very useful and it s hardly worth restricting their distribution please consider making your plugin either public domain or use the Vim license A short note about this near the top of the plugin should be sufficient Example 4 License This file is placed in the public domain LINE CONTINUATION AVOIDING SIDE EFFECTS USe cpo save In line 18 above the line continuation mechanism is used line continuation Users with compatible set will run into trouble here they will get an error message We can t just reset compatible because that has a lot
154. e file should be self explanatory Look at a few of the keymaps that are distributed with Vim For the details see mbyte keymap LAST RESORT If all other methods fail you can enter any character with CTRL V encoding type range 8 bit CTRL V 123 decimal 0 255 8 bit CTRL V x al hexadecimal 00 ff 16 bit CTRL V u 013b hexadecimal 0000 ffff 31 bit CTRL V U 001303a4 hexadecimal 00000000 7fffffff Don t type the spaces See i CTRL V_digit for the details Next chapter usr_90 txt Installing Vim Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 223 usr 90 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 14 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Installing Vim install Before you can use Vim you have to install it Depending on your system it s simple or easy This chapter gives a few hints and also explains how upgrading to a new version is done gis L Unix 902 MS Windows 903 Upgrading 90 4 Common installation issues 90 5 Uninstalling Vim Previous chapter usr 45 txt Select your language Table of contents usr_toc txt 90 1 Unix First you have to decide if you are going to install Vim system wide or fora single user The installation is almost the same but the directory where Vim is installed in differs For a system wide installation the base directory usr local is often used But this may be different for your system Try finding out where other packages are installed When installing fo
155. e for the line with process ID It might look like this process ID 12559 still running The text still running indicates that the process editing this file runs on the same computer When working on a non Unix system you will not get this extra hint When editing a file over a network you may not see the hint because the process might be running on another computer In those two cases you must find out what the situation is yourself If there is another Vim editing the same file continuing to edit will result in two versions of the same file The one that is written last will overwrite the other one resulting in loss of changes You better quit this Vim 2 The swap file might be the result from a previous crash of Vim or the computer Check the dates mentioned in the message If the date of the swap file is newer than the file you were editing and this line appears modified YES Then you very likely have a crashed edit session that is worth recovering If the date of the file is newer than the date of the swap file then either it was changed after the crash perhaps you recovered it earlier but didn t delete the swap file or else the file was saved before the crash but after the last write of the swap file then you re lucky you don t even need that old swap file Vim will warn you for this with this extra line NEWER than swap file WHAT TO DO If dialogs are supported you will be asked to select one of five cho
156. e g when the shell option is invalid Vim does a desperate try to find the file filename swp If that fails too you will have to give the name of the swapfile itself to be able to recover the file 11 3 Crashed or not ATTENTION E325 Vim tries to protect you from doing stupid things Suppose you innocently start editing a file expecting the contents of the file to show up Instead Vim produces a very long message E325 ATTENTION Found a swap file by the name main c swp owned by mool dated Tue May 29 21 09 28 2001 file name mool vim vim6 src main c modified no user name mool host name masaka moolenaar net process ID 12559 still running While opening file main c dated Tue May 29 19 46 12 2001 1 Another program may be editing the same file If this is the case be careful not to end up with two different instances of the same file when making changes Quit or continue with caution vim_doc txt Page 79 2 An edit session for this file crashed If this is the case use recover or vim r main c to recover the changes see help recovery If you did this already delete the swap file main c swp to avoid this message You get this message because when starting to edit a file Vim checks if a swap file already exists for that file If there is one there must be something wrong It may be one of these two situations 1 Another edit session is active on this file Look in the messag
157. e it is matched by xTodo and highlighted yellow highlighting for xTodo was setup for this RECURSIVE NESTING vim_doc txt Page 210 The x language defines code blocks in curly braces And a code block may contain other code blocks This can be defined this way Syntax region xBlock start end contains xBlock Suppose you have this text while i lt b ifa First a xBlock starts at the in the first line In the second line another is found Since we are inside a xBlock item and it contains itself a nested xBlock item will start here Thus the b c line is inside the second level xBlock region Then a is found in the next line which matches with the end pattern of the region This ends the nested xBlock Because the is included in the nested region it is hidden from the first xBlock region Then at the last the first xBlock region ends KEEPING THE END Consider the following two syntax items Syntax region xComment start end contained Syntax region xPreProc start end contains xComment You define a comment as anything from to the end of the line A preprocessor directive is anything from to the end of the line Because you can have a comment on a preprocessor line the preprocessor definition includes a contains xComment argument Now look what happens with this text define X Y Comment text Int foo dis What you see is that the second line is also highlighted as xPrePr
158. e line A Start Insert mode after moving the cursor to the end of the line vim_doc txt Page 32 Next chapter usr_05 txt Set your settings Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 33 usr O05 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Aug 13 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Set your settings Vim can be tuned to work like you want it to This chapter shows you how to make Vim start with options set to different values Add plugins to extend Vims capabilities Or define your own macros O54 The vimre file 05 2 The example vimrc file explained 05 3 Simple mappings 05 4 Adding a plugin 05 5 Adding a help file 0546 The option window OST Often used options Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 06 tXE Using syntax highlighting usr_04 txt Making small changes usr_toc txt 05 1 The vimre file vimrc intro You probably got tired of typing commands that you use very often To start with all your favorite option settings and mappings you write them in what is called the vimre file Vim reads this file when it starts up If you have trouble finding your vimre file use this command scriptnames One of the first files in the list should be called vimre or _vimrce and is located in your home directory If you don t have a vimre file yet see vimrc to find out where you can create a vimre file Also the version command mentions the name of the user vimre file Vi
159. e most obvious way to edit the command you type is by pressing the lt BS gt key This erases the character before the cursor To erase another character typed earlier first move the cursor with the cursor keys For example you have typed this efcol pig Before you hit lt Enter gt you notice that col should be cow To correct this you type lt Left gt five times The cursor is now just after col Type lt BS gt and w to correct s cow pig Now you can press lt Enter gt directly You don t have to move the cursor to the end of the line before executing the command The most often used keys to move around in the command line lt Left gt one character left lt Right gt one character right lt S Left gt or lt C Left gt one word left lt S Right gt or lt C Right gt one word right CTRL B or lt Home gt to begin of command line CTRL E or lt End gt to end of command line lt S Left gt cursor left key with Shift key pressed and lt C Left gt cursor left key with Control pressed will not work on all keyboards Same for the other Shift and Control combinations You can also use the mouse to move the cursor DELETING As mentioned lt BS gt deletes the character before the cursor To delete a whole word use CTRL W the fine pig CTRL W the fine vim_doc txt Page 87 CTRL U removes all text thus allows you to start all over again OVERSTRIKE The lt Insert gt key toggles between ins
160. e names that Vim uses are unix lt LF gt dos lt CR gt lt LF gt mac lt CR gt USING THE MAC FORMAT On Unix lt LF gt is used to break a line It s not unusual to have a lt CR gt character halfway a line Incidentally this happens quite often in Vi and Vim scripts On the Macintosh where lt CR gt is the line break character it s possible to have a lt LF gt character halfway a line The result is that it s not possible to be 100 sure whether a file containing both lt CR gt and lt LF gt characters is a Mac or a Unix file Therefore Vim assumes that on Unix you probably won t edit a Mac file and doesn t check for this type of file To check for this format anyway add mac to vim_doc txt Page 105 fileformats set fileformats mac Then Vim will take a guess at the file format Watch out for situations where Vim guesses wrong OVERRULING THE FORMAT If you use the good old Vi and try to edit an MS DOS format file you will find that each line ends with a M character M is lt CR gt The automatic detection avoids this Suppose you do want to edit the file that way Then you need to overrule the format edit ff unix file txt The string is an item that tells Vim that an option name follows which overrules the default for this single command ff is used for fileformat You could also use ff mac or ff dos This doesn t work for any option only ff and enc are currently impl
161. e system For Unix a single lt NL gt character is used For MS DOS Windows OS 2 and the like lt CR gt lt LF gt is used This is important when using mappings that end in a lt CR gt See source crnl WHITE SPACE Blank lines are allowed and ignored Leading whitespace characters blanks and TABs are always ignored The whitespaces between parameters e g between the set and the cpoptions in the example below are reduced to one blank character and plays the role of a separator the whitespaces after the last visible character may or may not be ignored depending on the situation see below For a set command involving the equal sign such as in set cpoptions aABceFst the whitespace immediately before the sign is ignored But there can be no whitespace after the sign To include a whitespace character in the value of an option it must be escaped by a backslash as in the following example set tags my nice file The same example written as set tags my nice file will issue an error because it is interpreted as set tags my set nice set file vim_doc txt Page 187 COMMENTS The character the double quote mark starts a comment Everything after and including this character until the end of line is considered a comment and is ignored except for commands that don t consider comments as shown in examples below A comment can start on any character position on the line There is
162. eXample language without an interesting name In a syntax file for csh scripts the name cshType would be used Thus the prefix is equal to the value of filetype These commands cause the words int long and char to be highlighted one way and the words if then else and endif to be highlighted another way Now you need to connect the x group names to standard Vim names You do this with the following commands highlight link xType Type highlight link xStatement Statement This tells Vim to highlight xType like Type and xStatement like Statement See group name for the standard names UNUSUAL KEYWORDS The characters used in a keyword must be in the iskeyword option If you use another character the word will never match Vim doesn t give a warning message for this The x language uses the character in keywords This is how it s done setlocal iskeyword Ssyntax keyword xStatement when not The setlocal command is used to change iskeyword only for the current buffer Still it does change the behavior of commands like w and If that is not wanted don t define a keyword but use a match explained in the next section The x language allows for abbreviations For example next can be abbreviated to n ne or nex You can define them by using this command Syntax keyword xStatement n ext This doesn t match nextone keywords always match whole words only 44 3
163. e_with_underscores FuncLength LENGTH Invalid names are foo bar and 6var These variables are global To see a list of currently defined variables use this command let You can use global variables everywhere This also means that when the variable count is used in one script file it might also be used in another file This leads to confusion at least and real problems at worst To avoid this you can use a variable local to a script file by prepending s For example one script contains this code let s count 1 while s count lt 5 source other vim let s count s count 1 endwhile Since s count is local to this script you can be sure that sourcing the other vim script will not change this variable If other vim also uses an S count variable it will be a different copy local to that script More vim_doc txt Page 176 about script local variables here script variable There are more kinds of variables see internal variables The most often used ones are b name variable local to a buffer w name variable local to a window g name global variable also in a function viname variable predefined by Vim DELETING VARIABLES Variables take up memory and show up in the output of the let command To delete a variable use the unlet command Example unlet s count This deletes the script local variable s count to free up the memory it uses If you are not sure if the variable exists and
164. econd plugin and the filetype has more than six characters You can use an extra directory to get around this mkdir VIM vimfiles ftplugin fortran copy thefile SVIM vimfiles ftplugin fortran too vim The generic names for the filetype plugins are ftplugin lt filetype gt vim ftplugin lt filetype gt lt name gt vim ftplugin lt filetype gt lt name gt vim Here lt name gt can be any name that you prefer Examples for the stuff filetype on Unix vim ftplugin stuff vim vim ftplugin stuff def vim vim ftplugin stuff header vim The lt filetype gt part is the name of the filetype the plugin is to be used for Only files of this filetype will use the settings from the plugin The lt name gt part of the plugin file doesn t matter you can use it to have several plugins for the same filetype Note that it must end in vim Further reading filetype plugins Documentation for the filetype plugins and information about how to avoid that mappings cause problems load plugins When the global plugins are loaded during startup ftplugin overrule Overruling the settings from a global plugin write plugin How to write a plugin script plugin details For more information about using plugins or when your plugin doesn t work new filetype How to detect a new file type 05 5 Adding a help file add local help matchit install If you are lucky the plugin you installed also comes with a help file We
165. ed The command executed for global must be one that starts with a colon Normal mode commands can not be used directly The normal command can do this for you Suppose you want to change foobar to barfoo but only in C style comments These comments start with Use this command g s foobar barfoo g This starts with g That is short for global just like s is short for substitute Then the pattern enclosed in plus characters Since the pattern we are looking for contains a slash this uses the plus character to vim_doc txt Page 70 separate the pattern Next comes the substitute command that changes foobar into barfoo The default range for the global command is the whole file Thus no range was specified in this example This is different from substitute which works on one line without a range The command isn t perfect since it also matches lines where appears halfway a line and the substitution will also take place before the Just like with substitute any pattern can be used When you learn more complicated patterns later you can use them here 10 5 Visual block mode With CTRL V you can start selection of a rectangular area of text There are a few commands that do something special with the text block There is something special about using the command in Visual block mode When the last motion command used was S all lines in the Visual selection will
166. ed directory You can then type an edit command for one of the files without prepending the path R Rename the file under the cursor You will be prompted for the new name D Delete the file under the cursor You will get a prompt to confirm this 22 2 The current directory Just like the shell Vim has the concept of a current directory Suppose you are in your home directory and want to edit several files in a directory VeryLongFileName You could do edit VeryLongFileName filel txt edit VeryLongFileName file2 txt edit VeryLongFileName file3 txt To avoid much of the typing do this cd VeryLongFileName edit filel txt edit file2 txt edit file3 txt The cd command changes the current directory You can see what the current directory is with the pwd command pwd home Bram VeryLongFileName Vim remembers the last directory that you used Use cd to go back to it Example pwd home Bram VeryLongFileName cd etc pwd ete cd pwd home Bram VeryLongFileName vim_doc txt Page 101 cd pwd ete WINDOW LOCAL DIRECTORY When you split a window both windows use the same current directory When you want to edit a number of files somewhere else in the new window you can make it use a different directory without changing the current directory in the other window This is called a local directory pwd home Bram VeryLongFileName S LLE led etc pwd ete
167. ee that Vim has added a comma for you To remove a character use For example to remove the underscore set iskeyword _ set iskeyword iskeyword 48 57 192 255 This time a comma is automatically deleted ROOM FOR MESSAGES When Vim starts there is one line at the bottom that is used for messages When a message is long it is either truncated thus you can only see part of it or the text scrolls and you have to press lt Enter gt to continue You can set the cmdheight option to the number of lines used for messages Example set cmdheight 3 This does mean there is less room to edit text thus it s a compromise Next chapter usr 06 txt Using syntax highlighting Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 42 tusr 06 tCxE For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 14 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Using syntax highlighting Black and white text is boring With colors your file comes to life This not only looks nice it also speeds up your work Change the colors used for the different sorts of text Print your text with the colors you see on the screen 06 1 Switching it on 06 2 No or wrong colors 06 3 Different colors 06 4 With colors or without colors 06 5 Printing with colors 06 6 Further reading Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr_07 txt Editing more than one file usr 05 txt Set your settings usr_toc txt 06 1 Switching it on It all st
168. efine which keys a mapping in a plugin uses the lt Leader gt item can be used 22 map lt unique gt lt Leader gt a lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd The lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd thing will do the work more about that further on The user can set the mapleader variable to the key sequence that he wants this mapping to start with Thus if the user has done let mapleader the mapping will define _a If the user didn t do this the default value will be used which is a backslash Then a map for a will be defined Note that lt unique gt is used this will cause an error message if the mapping already happened to exist map lt unique gt But what if the user wants to define his own key sequence We can allow that with this mechanism Bol if thasmapto lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd 22 map lt unique gt lt Leadersa lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd 23 endif This checks if a mapping to lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd already exists and only defines the mapping from lt Leaders gt a if it doesn t The user then has a chance of putting this in his vimre file map c lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd Then the mapped key sequence will be c instead of a or a PIECES If a script gets longer you often want to break up the work in pieces You can use functions or mappings for this But you don t want these functions and mappings to interfere with the ones from other scripts For example you could define a function Add but another scrip
169. emented The full names fileformat and encoding also work CONVERSION You can use the fileformat option to convert from one file format to another Suppose for example that you have an MS DOS file named README TXT that you want to convert to UNIX format Start by editing the MS DOS format file vim README TXT Vim will recognize this as a dos format file Now change the file format to UNIX set fileformat unix write The file is written in Unix format 23 2 Files on the internet Someone sends you an e mail message which refers to a file by its URL For example You can find the information here ftp ftp vim org pub vim README You could start a program to download the file save it on your local disk and then start Vim to edit it There is a much simpler way Move the cursor to any character of the URL Then use this command gt With a bit of luck Vim will figure out which program to use for downloading the file download it and edit the copy To open the file in a new window use CTRL W f If something goes wrong you will get an error message It s possible that the URL is wrong you don t have permission to read it the network connection is down etc Unfortunately it s hard to tell the cause of the error You might want to try the manual way of downloading the file Accessing files over the internet works with the netrw plugin Currently URLs with these formats are recognized ftp uses f
170. emove the extra space For more details see format comments Next chapter usr_31 txt Exploiting the GUI Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 161 tusr 21 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 31 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Exploiting the GUI Vim works well in a terminal but the GUI has a few extra items A file browser can be used for commands that use a file A dialog to make a choice between alternatives Use keyboard shortcuts to access menu items quickly e The file browser ee lee Confirmation 31 3 Menu shortcuts 31 4 Vim window position and size S255 Various Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr _40 txt Make new commands usr 304 xt Editing programs usr_toc txt 31 1 The file browser When using the File Open menu you get a file browser This makes it easier to find the file you want to edit But what if you want to split a window to edit another file There is no menu entry for this You could first use Window Split and then File Open but that s more work Since you are typing most commands in Vim opening the file browser with a typed command is possible as well To make the split command use the file browser prepend browse browse split Select a file and then the split command will be executed with it If you cancel the file dialog nothing happens the window isn t split You can also specify a file name argument This is
171. en the function name and use CTRL R v two times more You could have done the same with completion Using a register is useful when there are many words that start with the same characters If the register contains characters such as lt BS gt or other special characters they are interpreted as if they had been typed from the keyboard If you do not want this to happen you really want the lt BS gt to be inserted in the text use the command CTRL R CTRL R register 24 7 Abbreviations An abbreviation is a short word that takes the place of a long one For example ad stands for advertisement Vim enables you to type an abbreviation and then will automatically expand it for you To tell Vim to expand ad into advertisement every time you insert it use the following command iabbrev ad advertisement Now when you type ad the whole word advertisement will be inserted into the text This is triggered by typing a character that can t be part of a word for example a space What Is Entered What You See I saw the a I saw the a I saw the ad I saw the ad I saw the ad lt Space gt I saw the advertisement lt Space gt The expansion doesn t happen when typing just ad That allows you to type a word like add which will not get expanded Only whole words are checked for abbreviations ABBREVIATING SEVERAL WORDS It is possible to define an abbreviation that results in multiple words For example to define JB a
172. entation is restored for the next line CORRECTING INDENTS When you are using autoindent or smartindent to get the indent of the previous line there will be many times when you need to add or remove one shiftwidth worth of indent A quick way to do this is using the CTRL D and CTRL T commands in Insert mode For example you are typing a shell script that is supposed to look like this if test n a then echo a e cho Te Fa Start off by setting these option vim_doc txt Page 157 set autoindent shiftwidth 3 You start by typing the first line lt Enter gt and the start of the second line if test n a then echo Now you see that you need an extra indent Type CTRL T The result if test n a then echo The CTRL T command in Insert mode adds one shiftwidth to the indent no matter where in the line you are You continue typing the second line lt Enter gt and the third line This time the indent is OK Then lt Enter gt and the last line Now you have this if test n a then echo a echo i E E Ea To remove the superfluous indent in the last line press CTRL D This deletes one shiftwidth worth of indent no matter where you are in the line When you are in Normal mode you can use the gt gt and lt lt commands to shift lines gt and lt are operators thus you have the usual three ways to specify the lines you want to indent A useful combination is gt if This adds one indent
173. equence of test scripts to verify that Vim works as expected Vim will be started many times and all kinds of text and messages flash by If it is alright you will finally see test results ALL DONE If there are one or two messages about failed tests Vim might still work but not perfectly If you see a lot of error messages or Vim doesn t finish until the end there must be something wrong Either try to find out yourself or find someone who can solve it You could look in the maillist archive for a solution If everything else fails you could ask in the vim maillist if someone can help you INSTALLING install home If you want to install in your home directory edit the Makefile and search for a line prefix HOME Remove the at the start of the line When installing for the whole system Vim has most likely already selected a good installation directory for you You can also specify one see below vim_doc txt Page 225 You need to become root for the following To install Vim do make install That should move all the relevant files to the right place Now you can try running vim to verify that it works Use two simple tests to check if Vim can find its runtime files help Ssyntax enable If this doesn t work use this command to check where Vim is looking for the runtime files echo SVIMRUNTIME You can also start Vim with the V argument to see what happens during startup vim V Don t for
174. er Sentence There is also the as a sentence object The difference is that as includes the white space after the sentence and is doesn t If you would delete a sentence you want to delete the white space at the same time thus use das If you want to type new text the white space can remain thus you use cis You can also use text objects in Visual mode It will include the text object vim_doc txt Page 31 in the Visual selection Visual mode continues thus you can do this several times For example start Visual mode with v and select a sentence with as Now you can repeat as to include more sentences Finally you use an operator to do something with the selected sentences You can find a long list of text objects here text objects 04 9 Replace mode The R command causes Vim to enter replace mode In this mode each character you type replaces the one under the cursor This continues until you type lt Esc gt In this example you start Replace mode on the first t of text This is text Rinteresting lt Esc gt This is interesting You may have noticed that this command replaced 5 characters in the line with twelve others The R command automatically extends the line if it runs out of characters to replace It will not continue on the next line You can switch between Insert mode and Replace mode with the lt Insert gt key When you use lt BS gt backspace to make correction you will notice
175. er to that plus and click the left button The fold will open and you can see the text that it contains The fold column contains a minus sign for an open fold If you click on this the fold will close Obviously this only works when you have a working mouse You can also use Zo to open a fold and zc to close it DIFFING IN VIM Another way to start in diff mode can be done from inside Vim Edit the main c file then make a split and show the differences edit main c vertical diffsplit main c The vertical command is used to make the window split vertically If you omit this you will get a horizontal split If you have a patch or diff file you can use the third way to start diff mode First edit the file to which the patch applies Then tell Vim the name of the patch file edit main c vertical diffpatch main c diff WARNING The patch file must contain only one patch for the file you are editing Otherwise you will get a lot of error messages and some files might be patched unexpectedly The patching will only be done to the copy of the file in Vim The file on your harddisk will remain unmodified until you decide to write the file SCROLL BINDING When the files have more changes you can scroll in the usual way Vim will try to keep both the windows start at the same position so you can easily see the differences side by side When you don t want this for a moment use this command set noscrollbind
176. ern is used twice The first Chapter finds the line above the current position that matches this pattern Thus the pattern range is used to search backwards Similarly Chapter is used to search forward for the start of the next chapter To avoid confusion with the slashes the character was used in the substitute command here A slash or another character would have worked as well ADD AND SUBTRACT There is a slight error in the above command If the title of the next chapter had included grey it would be replaced as well Maybe that s what you wanted but what if you didn t Then you can specify an offset To search for a pattern and then use the line above it Chapter 1 You can use any number instead of the 1 To address the second line below the match Chapter 2 The offsets can also be used with the other items in a range Look at this one 3 5 This specifies the range that starts three lines below the cursor and ends five lines before the last line in the file vim_doc txt Page 69 USING MARKS Instead of figuring out the line numbers of certain positions remembering them and typing them in a range you can use marks Place the marks as mentioned in chapter 3 For example use mt to mark the top of an area and mb to mark the bottom Then you can use this range to specify the lines between the marks including the lines with the marks a kea TD VISUAL MODE AND RANGES You can select
177. erted until you type the last character that triggers it If the showcmd option is set the typed characters are displayed in the last line of the Vim window An exception is when a mapping is ambiguous Suppose you have done two mappings imap aa foo imap aaa bar Now when you type aa Vim doesn t know if it should apply the first or the second mapping It waits for another character to be typed If it is an a the second mapping is applied and results in bar If it is a space for example the first mapping is applied resulting in foo and then the space is inserted ADDITIONALLY The lt script gt keyword can be used to make a mapping local to a script See map lt script gt The lt buffer gt keyword can be used to make a mapping local to a specific buffer See map lt buffer gt The lt unique gt keyword can be used to make defining a new mapping fail when it already exists Otherwise a new mapping simply overwrites the old one See map lt unique gt To make a key do nothing map it to lt Nop gt five characters This will make the lt F7 gt key do nothing at all map lt F7 gt lt Nop gt map lt F7 gt lt Nop gt There must be no space after lt Nop gt 40 2 Defining command line commands The Vim editor enables you to define your own commands You execute these commands just like any other Command line mode command To define a command use the command command as follo
178. erting characters and replacing the existing ones Start with this text the fine pig Move the cursor to the start of fine with lt S Left gt twice or lt Left gt eight times if lt S Left gt doesn t work Now press lt Insert gt to switch to overstrike and type great the greatpig Oops we lost the space Now don t use lt BS gt because it would delete the t this is different from Replace mode Instead press lt Insert gt to switch from overstrike to inserting and type the space the great pig CANCELLING You thought of executing a or command but changed your mind To get rid of what you already typed without executing it press CTRL C or lt Esc gt lt Esc gt is the universal get out key Unfortunately in the good old Vi pressing lt Esc gt in a command line executed the command Since that might be considered to be a bug Vim uses lt Esc gt to cancel the command But with the cpoptions option it can be made Vi compatible And when using a mapping which might be written for Vi lt Esc gt also works Vi compatible Therefore using CTRL C is a method that always works If you are at the start of the command line pressing lt BS gt will cancel the command It s like deleting the or that the line starts with 20 2 Command line abbreviations Some of the commands are really long We already mentioned that substitute can be abbreviated to s This is a generic mecha
179. ery high number to make it appear on the far right The second number 340 determines the location of the item within the pull down menu Lower numbers go on top higher number on the bottom These are the priorities in the File menu 10 310 Open 10 320 Split Open 10 325 New 10 330 Close 10 335 10 340 Save 10 350 Save As 10 400 10 410 Split Diff with 10 420 Split Patched By 10 500 10 510 Print 10 600 10 610 Save Exit 10 620 Exit Notice that there is room in between the numbers This is where you can insert your own items if you really want to it s often better to leave the standard menus alone and add a new menu for your own items When you create a submenu you can add another number to the priority Thus each name in menu item has its priority number SPECIAL CHARACTERS The menu item in this example is amp File amp Save lt Tab gt w This brings up an important point menu item must be one word If you want to put a dot space or tabs in the name you either use the lt gt notation lt Space gt and lt Tab gt for instance or use the backslash escape menu 10 305 amp File amp Do It exit lt CR gt In this example the name of the menu item Do It contains a space and the command is exit lt CR gt The lt Tab gt character in a menu name is used to separate the part that defines the menu name from the part that gives a hint to the user T
180. es a string to show at the start of broken line Set textwidth to zero to avoid a paragraph to be split MOVING BY VISIBLE LINES The j and k commands move to the next and previous lines When used on a long line this means moving a lot of screen lines at once To move only one screen line use the gj and gk commands When a line doesn t wrap they do the same as j and k When the line does wrap they move to a character displayed one line below or above You might like to use these mappings which bind these movement commands to the cursor keys map lt Up gt gk map lt Down gt gj TURNING A PARAGRAPH INTO ONE LINE If you want to import text into a program like MS Word each paragraph should be a Single line If your paragraphs are currently separated with empty lines this is how you turn each paragraph into a single line 9 join That looks complicated Let s break it up in pieces g A global command that finds all lines that contain at least one character A range starting from the current line the non empty line until an empty line join The join command joins the range of lines together into one line Starting with this text containing eight lines broken at column 30 A letter generation program for a bank They wanted to send out a special personalized letter To their richest 1000 customers Unfortunately for the programmer You end up wit
181. es one line down and filters the lines until the next empty line You could also select the lines in Visual mode and then use sort That s easier to type but more work when there are many lines The result is this OBIS backup o getopt o getoptl o inp a patch o peho 5 uilc version o Notice that a backslash at the end of each line is used to indicate the line continues After sorting this is wrong The backup o line that was at the end didn t have a backslash Now that it sorts to another place it must have a backslash The simplest solution is to add the backslash with A lt Esc gt You can keep the backslash in the last line if you make sure an empty line comes after it That way you don t have this problem again 12 4 Reverse line order The global command can be combined with the move command to move all the lines before the first line resulting in a reversed file The command is global m 0 Abbreviated g m 0 The regular expression matches the beginning of the line even if the line is blank The move command moves the matching line to after the mythical zeroeth line so the current matching line becomes the first line of the file As the global command is not confused by the changing line numbering global proceeds to match all remaining lines of the file and puts each as the first This also works on a range of lines First move to above the first line and ma
182. ess the arrow keys you must move your hand from the text keys to the arrow keys Considering that you might be doing it hundreds of times an hour this can take a significant amount of time Also there are keyboards which do not have arrow keys or which locate them in unusual places therefore knowing the use of the hjkl keys helps in those situations One way to remember these commands is that h is on the left 1 is on the right and j points down In a picture k h I j The best way to learn these commands is by using them Use the i command to insert some more lines of text Then use the hjkl keys to move around and insert a word somewhere Don t forget to press lt Esc gt to go back to Normal mode The vimtutor is also a nice way to learn by doing For Japanse users Hiroshi Iwatani suggested using this Komsomolsk Huan Ho lt gt Los Angeles Yellow river Java the island not the programming language 02 4 Deleting characters To delete a character move the cursor over it and type x This is a throwback to the old days of the typewriter when you deleted things by typing xxxx over them Move the cursor to the beginning of the first line for example and type xxxxxxx seven x s to delete A very The result should look like this intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle Now you can insert new text for example by typing iA young lt Esc gt This begins an i
183. everal people The solution for this situation is adding a modeline to the file This is a line of text that tells Vim the values of options to be used in this file only A typical example is a C program where you make indents by a multiple of 4 spaces This requires setting the shiftwidth option to 4 This modeline will do that vim set shiftwidth 4 Put this line as one of the first or last five lines in the file When editing the file you will notice that shiftwidth will have been set to four When editing another file it s set back to the default value of eight For some files the modeline fits well in the header thus it can be put at the top of the file For text files and other files where the modeline gets in the way of the normal contents put it at the end of the file The modelines option specifies how many lines at the start and end of the file are inspected for containing a modeline To inspect ten lines set modelines 10 The modeline option can be used to switch this off Do this when you are working as root or don t trust the files you are editing set nomodeline Use this format for the modeline any text vim set option value any text The any text indicates that you can put any text before and after the part that Vim will use This allows making it look like a comment like what was done above with and vim_doc txt Page 98 The vim part is what makes Vim recognize this lin
184. extend until the end of the line also when the line with the cursor is shorter This remains effective until you use a motion command that moves the cursor horizontally Thus using j keeps it h stops it INSERTING TEXT The command I string lt Esc gt inserts the text string in each line just left of the visual block You start by pressing CTRL V to enter visual block mode Now you move the cursor to define your block Next you type I to enter Insert mode followed by the text to insert As you type the text appears on the first line only After you press lt Esc gt to end the insert the text will magically be inserted in the rest of the lines contained in the visual selection Example include one include two include three include four Move the cursor to the o of one and press CTRL V Move it down with 3j to four You now have a block selection that spans four lines Now type Imain lt Esc gt The result include main one include main two include main three include main four If the block spans short lines that do not extend into the block the text is not inserted in that line For example make a Visual block selection that includes the word long in the first and last line of this text and thus has no text selected in the second line This is a long line short Any other long line selected block Now use the command Ivery lt Esc gt The result is This is a very long line short Any othe
185. fic name directory indent filetype vim The filetype is the name of the file type such as cpp or java You can see the exact name that Vim detected with this command set filetype In this file the output is filetype help This you would use help for filetype For the directory part you need to use your runtime directory Look at the output of this command set runtimepath Now use the first item the name before the first comma Thus if the output looks like this runtimepath vim usr local share vim vim60 runtime vim after You use vim for directory Then the resulting file name is vim indent help vim Instead of switching the indenting off you could write your own indent file How to do that is explained here indent expression 30 4 Other indenting The most simple form of automatic indenting is with the autoindent option It uses the indent from the previous line A bit smarter is the smartindent option This is useful for languages where no indent file is available smartindent is not as smart as cindent but smarter than autoindent With smartindent set an extra level of indentation is added for each and removed for each An extra level of indentation will also be added for any of the words in the cinwords option Lines that begin with are treated specially all indentation is removed This is done so that preprocessor directives will all start in column 1 The ind
186. file but the line must be appended at the end You can repeat this as many times as you like 10 7 Formatting text When you are typing plain text it s nice if the length of each line is automatically trimmed to fit in the window To make this happen while inserting text set the textwidth option set textwidth 72 You might remember that in the example vimrce file this command was used for every text file Thus if you are using that vimre file you were already using it To check the current value of textwidth set textwidth Now lines will be broken to take only up to 72 characters But when you insert text halfway a line or when you delete a few words the lines will get too long or too short Vim doesn t automatically reformat the text To tell Vim to format the current paragraph gqap This starts with the gq command which is an operator Following is ap the text object that stands for a paragraph A paragraph is separated from the next paragraph by an empty line A blank line which contains white space does NOT separate paragraphs This is hard to notice Instead of ap you could use any motion or text object If your paragraphs are properly separated you can use this command to format the whole file gggqG gg takes you to the first line gq is the format operator and G the motion that jumps to the last line In case your paragraphs aren t clearly defined you can format just the lines
187. fold all the sections in this chapter Try it out You will notice that opening the fold for the whole chapter will restore the nested folds as they were some may be open and some may be closed Suppose you have created several folds and now want to view all the text You could go to each fold and type zo To do this faster use this command zr This will R educe the folding The opposite is zm This folds M ore You can repeat zr and zm to open and close nested folds of several levels If you have nested several levels deep you can open all of them with ZR This R educes folds until there are none left And you can close all folds with zM This folds M ore and M ore You can quickly disable the folding with the zn command Then zN brings back the folding as it was zi toggles between the two This is a useful way of working create folds to get overview on your file move around to where you want to do your work do zi to look at the text and edit it do zi again to go back to moving around More about manual folding in the reference manual fold manual 28 3 Working with folds When some folds are closed movement commands like j and k move over a fold like it was a single empty line This allows you to quickly move around over folded text You can yank delete and put folds as if it was a single line This is very useful if you want to reorder functions in a program First make
188. for the following echo command echohl None stops it again The echon command works like echo but doesn t output a line break LISTING FUNCTIONS The function command lists the names and arguments of all user defined functions function Function Show Start saj function GetVimIndent function SetSyn name To see what a function does use its name as an argument for function function SetSyn T Li syntax 11 2 let amp syntax a name 3 endif endfunction DEBUGGING The line number is useful for when you get an error message or when debugging See debug scripts about debugging mode You can also set the verbose option to 12 or higher to see all function calls Set it to 15 or higher to see every executed line DELETING A FUNCTION To delete the Show function delfunction Show You get an error when the function doesn t exist 41 8 Exceptions Let s start with an example CEY read templates pascal tmpl catch E484 echo Sorry the Pascal template file cannot be found endtry The read command will fail if the file does not exist Instead of generating an error message this code catches the error and gives the user a nice message instead For the commands in between try and endtry errors are turned into exceptions An exception is a string In the case of an error the string contains the error message And every error message has a number In this case the erro
189. fter compiler Next chapter usr_42 txt Add new menus Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 198 tusr 42 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 08 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Add new menus By now you know that Vim is very flexible This includes the menus used in the GUI You can define your own menu entries to make certain commands easily accessible This is for mouse happy users only A 3A Introduction A422 Menu commands 42 3 Various 42 4 Toolbar and popup menus Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr _43 txt Using filetypes usr _41 txt Write a Vim script usr toc xt 42 1 Introduction The menus that Vim uses are defined in the file SVIMRUNTIME menu vim If you want to write your own menus you might first want to look through that file To define a menu item use the menu command The basic form of this command is as follows menu menu item keys The menu item describes where on the menu to put the item A typical menu item is File Save which represents the item Save under the File menu A dot is used to separate the names Example menu File Save update lt CR gt The update command writes the file when it was modified You can add another level Edit Settings Shiftwidth defines a submenu Settings under the Edit menu with an item Shiftwidth You could use even deeper levels Don t use this too much you need to
190. fterwards To be on the safe side write this file under another name write help txt recovered Compare the file with the original file to check if you ended up with what you expected Vimdiff is very useful for this 08 7 Watch out for the original file to contain a more recent version you saved the file just before the computer crashed And check that no lines are missing something went wrong that Vim could not recover If Vim produces warning messages when recovering read them carefully This is rare though It s normal that the last few changes can not be recovered Vim flushes the changes to disk when you don t type for about four seconds or after typing about two hundred characters This is set with the updatetime and updatecount options Thus when Vim didn t get a chance to save itself when the system went down the changes after the last flush will be lost If you were editing without a file name give an empty string as argument vim F n You must be in the right directory otherwise Vim can t find the swap file 11 2 Where is the swap file Vim can store the swap file in several places Normally it is in the same directory as the original file To find it change to the directory of the file and use vim r vim_doc txt Page 78 Vim will list the swap files that it can find It will also look in other directories where the swap file for files in the current directory may be located It will not f
191. g command make main c This is not too useful so you will refine the command a little and use the r root modifier set makeprg make r o Now the command executed is as follows make main o More about these modifiers here filename modifiers vim_doc txt Page 154 OLD ERROR LISTS Suppose you make a program There is an warning message in one file and an error message in another You fix the error and use make again to check if it was really fixed Now you want to look at the warning message It doesn t show up in the last error list since the file with the warning wasn t compiled again You can go back to the previous error list with colder Then use clist and cc nr to jump to the place with the warning To go forward to the next error list Cnewer Vim remembers ten error lists SWITCHING COMPILERS You have to tell Vim what format the error messages are that your compiler produces This is done with the errorformat option The syntax of this option is quite complicated and it can be made to fit almost any compiler You can find the explanation here errorformat You might be using various different compilers Setting the makeprg option and especially the errorformat each time is not easy Vim offers a simple method for this For example to switch to using the Microsoft Visual C compiler compiler msvc This will find the Vim script for the msvc compiler and set the appropriate
192. g is an option character followed by an argument The option argument pairs are separated by commas Take a look at how you can build up your own viminfo string First the option is used to specify how many files for which you save marks a z Pick a nice even number for this option 1000 for instance Your command now looks like this set viminfo 1000 The f option controls whether global marks A Z and 0 9 are stored If this option is 0 none are stored If it is 1 or you do not specify an f option the marks are stored You want this feature so now you have this set viminfo 1000 f1 The option controls how many lines are saved for each of the registers By default all the lines are saved If 0 nothing is saved To avoid adding thousands of lines to your viminfo file which might never get used and makes starting Vim slower you use a maximum of 500 lines set viminfo 1000 F1 500 Since the character starts a comment it must be preceded with a backslash Other options you might want to use number of lines to save from the command line history number of lines to save from the input line history number of lines to save from the search history r removable media for which no marks will be stored can be used several times global variables that start with an uppercase letter and don t contain lowercase letters vim_doc txt Page 94 h disable hlsearch highlighting when starting the buffer lis
193. get that the user manual assumes you Vim in a certain way After installing Vim follow the instructions at not compatible to make Vim work as assumed in this manual SELECTING FEATURES Vim has many ways to select features One of the simple ways is to edit the Makefile There are many directions and examples Often you can enable or disable a feature by uncommenting a line An alternative is to run configure separately This allows you to specify configuration options manually The disadvantage is that you have to figure out what exactly to type Some of the most interesting configure arguments follow These can also be enabled from the Makefile prefix directory Top directory where to install Vim with features tiny Compile with many features disabled with features small Compile with some features disabled with features big Compile with more features enabled with features huge Compile with most features enabled See feature list for which feature is enabled in which case enable perlinterp Enable the Perl interface There are Similar arguments for ruby python and tal disable gui Do not compile the GUI interface without x Do not compile X windows features When both of these are used Vim will not connect to the X server which makes startup faster To see the whole list use configure help You can find a bit of explanation for each feature and links for more information here feature list
194. gic of autocommands and Vim scripts the window will be filled with the contents of the directory It looks like this Press for keyboard shortcuts Sorted by name bak 0 h info swp obj orig rej at end of list home mool vim vim6 runtime doc check Makefile autocmd txt change txt eval txt filetype txt help txt info You can see these items 1 A comment about using to get help for the functionality of the file explorer The second line mentions how the items in the directory are listed They can be sorted in several ways The third line is the name of the current directory The directory item This is the parent directory The directory names The ordinary file names As mentioned in the second line some are not here but at the end of the list The less ordinary file names You are expected to use these less often therefore they have been moved to the end N oO Ul B WwW N If you have syntax highlighting enabled the different parts are highlighted to make it easier to spot them You can use Normal mode Vim commands to move around in the text For example move to a file and press lt Enter gt Now you are editing that file To go back to the explorer use edit again CTRL O also works Try using lt Enter gt while the cursor is on a directory name The result is that the explorer moves into that directory and displays the items found there Pressing lt Enter gt on t
195. gram block You can do this with the following command omap lt F7 gt a This causes lt F7 gt to perform a select block a in operator pending mode just like you typed it This mapping is useful if typing a on your keyboard is a bit difficult LISTING MAPPINGS To see the currently defined mappings use map without arguments Or one of the variants that include the mode in which they work The output could look like this g call MyGrep 1 lt CR gt y lt F2 gt S gt lt CR gt noh lt CR gt n lt F2 gt s gt lt CR gt noh lt CR gt lt xHome gt lt Home gt lt xEnd gt lt End gt The first column of the list shows in which mode the mapping is effective This is n for Normal mode i for Insert mode etc A blank is used for a mapping defined with map thus effective in both Normal and Visual mode One useful purpose of listing the mapping is to check if special keys in lt gt form have been recognized this only works when color is supported For example when lt Esc gt is displayed in color it stands for the escape character When it has the same color as the other text it is five characters REMAPPING The result of a mapping is inspected for other mappings in it For example the mappings for lt F2 gt above could be shortened to map lt F2 gt G lt F3 gt imap lt F2 gt lt Esc gt lt F3 gt map lt F3 gt oDate lt Esc gt read date lt CR gt kJ For Normal mode lt F2
196. gt is mapped to go to the last line and then behave like lt F3 gt was pressed In Insert mode lt F2 gt stops Insert mode with lt Esc gt and then also uses lt F3 gt Then lt F3 gt is mapped to do the actual work Suppose you hardly ever use Ex mode and want to use the Q command to format text this was so in old versions of Vim This mapping will do it map Q gq But in rare cases you need to use Ex mode anyway Let s map gQ to Q so that you can still go to Ex mode map gQ Q What happens now is that when you type gQ it is mapped to Q So far so good But then Q is mapped to gq thus typing gQ results in gq and you don t get to Ex mode at all To avoid keys to be mapped again use the noremap command noremap gQ Q Now Vim knows that the Q is not to be inspected for mappings that apply to it There is a similar command for every mode vim_doc txt Page 167 noremap Normal Visual and Operator pending vnoremap Visual nnoremap Normal onoremap Operator pending noremap Insert and Command line inoremap Insert Cnoremap Command line RECURSIVE MAPPING When a mapping triggers itself it will run forever This can be used to repeat an action an unlimited number of times For example you have a list of files that contain a version number in the first line You edit these files with vim txt You are now editing the first file Define this mapping map 8 5 1 5 2 lt CR gt wnext
197. guage with the language command Use this name but with all letters made lowercase Then copy the file to your own runtime directory as found early in runtimepath For example for Unix you would do cp SVIMRUNTIME lang menu_ko_kr euckr vim vim lang menu_nl_be iso_ 8859 1 vim You will find hints for the translation in VIMRUNTIME lang README txt 45 3 Using another encoding Vim guesses that the files you are going to edit are encoded for your language For many European languages this is latinl Then each byte is one character That means there are 256 different characters possible For Asian languages this is not sufficient These mostly use a double byte encoding providing for over ten thousand possible characters This still isn t enough when a text is to contain several different languages This is vim_doc txt Page 219 where Unicode comes in It was designed to include all characters used in commonly used languages This is the Super encoding that replaces all others But it isn t used that much yet Fortunately Vim supports these three kinds of encodings And with some restrictions you can use them even when your environment uses another language than the text Nevertheless when you only edit files that are in the encoding of your language the default should work fine and you don t need to do anything The following is only relevant when you want to edit different languages Using different encodings
198. gvim This avoids the need for a correct terminal setup Q My Backspace And Delete Keys Don t Work Right The definition of what key sends what code is very unclear for backspace lt BS gt and Delete lt Del gt keys First of all check your TERM setting If there is nothing wrong with it try this set t_kb V lt BS gt set t_kD V lt Del gt In the first line you need to press CTRL V and then hit the backspace key In the second line you need to press CTRL V and then hit the Delete key You can put these lines in your vimre file see 05 1 A disadvantage is that it won t work when you use another terminal some day Look here for alternate solutions fixdel Q I Am Using RedHat Linux Can I Use the Vim That Comes with the System By default RedHat installs a minimal version of Vim Check your RPM packages for something named Vim enhanced version rpm and install that Q How Do I Turn Syntax Coloring On How do I make plugins work Use the example vimre script You can find an explanation on how to use it here not compatible See chapter 6 for information about syntax highlighting usr_06 txt Q What Is a Good vimre File to Use See the www vim org Web site for several good examples Q Where Do I Find a Good Vim Plugin See the Vim online site http vim sf net Many users have uploaded useful Vim scripts and plugins there Q Where Do I Find More Tips See the Vim online site http vim sf net The
199. h For Unix that would be vim syntax The name of the syntax file must be equal to the file type with vim added Thus for the x language the full path of the file would be vim syntax x vim You must also make the file type be recognized See 43 2 If your file works well you might want to make it available to other Vim users First read the next section to make sure your file works well for others Then e mail it to the Vim maintainer lt maintainer vim org gt Also explain how the filetype can be detected With a bit of luck your file will be included in the next Vim version ADDING TO AN EXISTING SYNTAX FILE We were assuming you were adding a completely new syntax file When an existing syntax file works but is missing some items you can add items in a separate file That avoids changing the distributed syntax file which will be lost when installing a new version of Vim Write syntax commands in your file possibly using group names from the existing syntax For example to add new variable types to the C syntax file Ssyntax keyword cType off t uint Write the file with the same name as the original syntax file In this case c vim Place it in a directory near the end of runtimepath This makes it loaded after the original syntax file For Unix this would be vim after syntax c vim 44 12 Portable syntax file layout Wouldn t it be nice if all Vim users exchange syntax files To make this possib
200. h two lines A letter generation program for a bank They wanted to send out as pecial personalized letter To their richest 1000 customers vim_doc txt Page 123 Unfortunately for the programmer Note that this doesn t work when the separating line is blank but not empty when it contains spaces and or tabs This command does work with blank lines 8 7 s S join This still requires a blank or empty line at the end of the file for the last paragraph to be joined 25 5 Editing tables Suppose you are editing a table with four columns nice table test 1 test 2 test 3 input A 0 534 input B 0 913 You need to enter numbers in the third column You could move to the second line use A enter a lot of spaces and type the text For this kind of editing there is a special option set virtualedit all Now you can move the cursor to positions where there isn t any text This is called virtual space Editing a table is a lot easier this way Move the cursor by searching for the header of the last column test 3 Now press j and you are right where you can enter the value for input A Typing 0 693 results in nice table test 1 test 2 test 3 input A 0 534 9 693 input B 0 913 Vim has automatically filled the gap in front of the new text for you Now to enter the next field in this column use Bj B moves back to the start of a white space separated word Then j moves to the place
201. h xxd 7 luxd The text will look like this 0000000 1 8b 0808 39d7 173b 0203 7474 002b 4e49 eva GES Pen CE ot 0000010 4b2c 8660 eb9c ecac c462 eb94 345e 2e30 K oper tae 0000020 373b 2731 0b22 Ocae Gla2 d 69 1035 329d9 FE Le isas 4 68 You can now view and edit the text as you like Vim treats the information as ordinary text Changing the hex does not cause the printable character to be changed or the other way around Finally convert it back with olaxd r Only changes in the hex part are used Changes in the printable text part on the right are ignored See the manual page of xxd for more information 23 5 Compressed files This is easy You can edit a compressed file just like any other file The gzip plugin takes care of decompressing the file when you edit it And compressing it again when you write it These compression methods are currently supported Z compress GZ gzip bz2 bzip2 Vim uses the mentioned programs to do the actual compression and decompression You might need to install the programs first Next chapter usr 24 txt Inserting quickly Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 109 usr 24 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 30 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Inserting quickly When entering text Vim offers various ways to reduce the number of keystrokes and avoid typing mistakes Use Insert mode completion to repeat previously typed wo
202. hat can move the cursor further than within the same line this is called a jump This includes the search commands and n it doesn t matter how far away the match is But not the character searches with fx and tx or the word movements w and e Also j and k are not considered to be a jump Even when you use a count to make them move the cursor quite a long way away The command jumps back and forth between two points The CTRL O command jumps to older positions Hint O for older CTRL I then jumps back to newer positions Hint I is just next to O on the keyboard Consider this sequence of commands 33G 7 The CTRL O You first jump to line 33 then search for a line that starts with The Then with CTRL O you jump back to line 33 Another CTRL O takes you back to where you started If you now use CTRL I you jump to line 33 again And vim_doc txt Page 24 to the match for The with another CTRL I example text example text CTRL O example text V line 33 text example text V 33G CTRL I The example text CTRL O CTRL I There you are example text lt lt CTRL I is the same as lt Tab gt The jumps command gives a list of positions you jumped to The entry which you used last is marked with a gt NAMED MARKS Vim enables you to place your own marks in the text The command ma marks the place under the cursor as mark a You can place 26 marks a through z in your te
203. he Vim editor is not a word processor In a word processor if you delete something at the beginning of the paragraph the line breaks are reworked In Vim they are not so if you delete the word programming from the first line all you get is a short line vim_doc txt Page 118 1 2 3 12345678901234567890123456789012345 I taught for a while One time I was stopped by the Fort Worth police because my homework was too hard True story This does not look good To get the paragraph into shape you use the gq operator Let s first use this with a Visual selection Starting from the first line type v4jgq y to start Visual mode 4j to move to the end of the paragraph and then the gq operator The result is all 2 3 12345678901234567890123456789012345 I taught for a while One time I was stopped by the Fort Worth police because my homework was too hard True Story Since gq is an operator you can use one of the three ways to select the text it works on With Visual mode with a movement and with a text object The example above could also be done with gq4j That s less typing but you have to know the line count A more useful motion command is This moves to the end of a paragraph Thus gq formats from the cursor to the end of the current paragraph A very useful text object to use with gq is the paragraph Try this gqap ap stands for a paragraph This formats the text of one paragraph separated
204. he end an lt End gt key it will do the same thing The Al command zero does the same thing Ina picture Moving to the start or end of a line command moves to the first non blank character of the line moves to the very first character of the line o the Teresa indicates blanks here The command takes a count editor to move to the end of another line the end of the first line like most movement commands the end of the line several times doesn t make sense the one you re on of a line If your keyboard has The 0 The lt Home gt key gt But moving to Therefore it causes the For example 1S moves you to 2S to the end of the next line and so on The 0 command doesn t take a count argument because the 0 would be part of the count Unexpectedly using a count with doesn t have any effect 03 3 Moving to a character One of the most useful movement commands is command The command fx searches forward character x Hint f stands for Find For example you are at the beginning of want to go to the h of human Just execute will be positioned over the h To err is human To really foul up gt gt fy fh This also shows that the command fy moves You can specify a count therefore se a To err is human To really foul up 3f1 7 The F command searches to the left To err is human To really foul up lt Fh The tx command works like
205. he first directory moves you one level higher Pressing does the same thing without the need to move to the item first You can press to get short help on the things you can do in the explorer This is what you get lt enter gt open file or directory Oo open new window for file directory vim_doc txt Page 100 open file in previously visited window p preview the file AE toggle size date listing s select sort field r reverse sort 3 go up one level gt cd to this dir R rename file D delete file help file explorer for detailed help The first few commands are for selecting a file to display Depending on what command you use the file appears somewhere lt Enter gt Uses the current window fe Opens a new window O Uses the previously visited window p Uses the preview window and moves the cursor back into the explorer window preview window The following commands are used to display other information i Display the size and date for the file Using i again will hide the information s Use the field the cursor is in to sort on First display the size and date with i Then Move the cursor to the size of any file and press s The files will now be sorted on size Press s wile the cursor is on a date and the items will be sorted on date r reverse the sorting order either size or date There are a few extra commands c Change the current directory to the display
206. he part after the lt Tab gt is displayed right aligned in the menu In the File Save menu the name used is amp File amp Save lt Tab gt w Thus the menu name is File Save and the hint is w SEPARATORS The separator lines used to group related menu items together can be defined by using a name that starts and ends ina For example sep When using several separators the names must be different Otherwise the names don t matter The command from a separator will never be executed but you have to define one anyway A single colon will do Example amenu 20 510 Edit sep3 42 2 Menu commands You can define menu items that exist for only certain modes This works just like the variations on the map command menu Normal Visual and Operator pending mode vim_doc txt Page 200 nmenu Normal mode vmenu Visual mode omenu Operator pending mode menu Insert and Command line mode imenu Insert mode cmenu Command line mode amenu All modes To avoid that the commands of a menu item are being mapped use the command noremenu nnoremenu anoremenu etc USING AMENU The amenu command is a bit different It assumes that the keys you give are to be executed in Normal mode When Vim is in Visual or Insert mode when the menu is used Vim first has to go back to Normal mode amenu inserts a CTRL C or CTRL O for you For example if you use this command amenu 90 100 Mine Find Word
207. hem exactly where you want them That avoids that a few lines are missed when you cut and paste folds And you can add a comment about what is contained in the fold Folding by indent is something that works in many files but not always very well Use it when you can t use one of the other methods However it is very useful for outlining Then you specifically use one shiftwidth for each nesting level Folding with expressions can make folds in almost any structured text It is quite simple to specify especially if the start and end of a fold can easily be recognized If you use the expr method to define folds but they are not exactly how you want them you could switch to the manual method This will not remove the defined folds Then you can delete or add folds manually Next chapter usr_29 txt Moving through programs Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 143 tusr 29 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Aug 14 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Moving through programs The creator of Vim is a computer programmer It s no surprise that Vim contains many features to aid in writing programs Jump around to find where identifiers are defined and used Preview declarations in a separate window There is more in the next chapter 29 Using tags 29 2 The preview window 243 Moving through a program 29 4 Finding global identifiers 29 5 Finding local identifiers Next chapter Previous chapter
208. hen you are not using the GUI the confirm command works as well Instead of popping up a dialog Vim will print the message at the bottom of the Vim window and ask you to press a key to make a choice confirm edit main c Save changes to Untitled Yles N o C ancel You can now press the single key for the choice You don t have to press lt Enter gt unlike other typing on the command line 31 3 Menu shortcuts The keyboard is used for all Vim commands The menus provide a simple way to select commands without knowing what they are called But you have to move your hand from the keyboard and grab the mouse Menus can often be selected with keys as well This depends on your system but most often it works this way Use the lt Alt gt key in combination with the underlined letter of a menu For example lt A w gt lt Alt gt and w pops up the Window menu In the Window menu the split item has the p underlined To select it let go of the lt Alt gt key and press p After the first selection of a menu with the lt Alt gt key you can use the cursor vim_doc txt Page 163 keys to move through the menus lt Left gt selects a submenu and lt Right gt closes it lt Esc gt also closes a menu lt Enter gt selects a menu item There is a conflict between using the lt Alt gt key to select menu items and using lt Alt gt key combinations for mappings The winaltkeys option tells Vim what it should do with
209. here in Insert mode the lt BS gt is allowed to delete the character in front of the cursor The three items separated by commas tell Vim to delete the white space at the start of the line a line break and the character before where Insert mode started set autoindent This makes Vim use the indent of the previous line for a newly created line Thus there is the same amount of white space before the new line For example when pressing lt Enter gt in Insert mode and when using the o command to open a new line if has vms set nobackup else set backup endif This tells Vim to keep a backup copy of a file when overwriting it But not on the VMS system since it keeps old versions of files already The backup file will have the same name as the original file with added See 07 4 set history 50 Keep 50 commands and 50 search patterns in the history Use another number if you want to remember fewer or more lines set ruler Always display the current cursor position in the lower right corner of the Vim window set showcmd Display an incomplete command in the lower right corner of the Vim window left of the ruler For example when you type 2f Vim is waiting for you to type the character to find and 2f is displayed When you press w next the 2fw command is executed and the displayed 2f is removed text in the Vim window VISUAL 2 43 8 17 showmode showcmd ruler set incsearch
210. his Now you only need to tell Vim where your big tags file is set tags proj tags MULTIPLE MATCHES When a function is defined multiple times or a method in several classes the tag command will jump to the first one If there is a match in the current file that one is used first You can now jump to other matches for the same tag with tnext Repeat this to find further matches If there are many you can select which one to jump to tselect tagname Vim will present you with a list of choices pri kind tag file 1 F mech init os_amiga c meh init 2B 4 mch_init os mac e mch_init 3 F E meh init os_msdos c mch_init void 4 F meh init SS _ riscos mch_init Enter nr of choice lt CR gt to abort You can now enter the number in the first column of the match that you would like to jump to The information in the other columns give you a good idea of where the match is defined To move between the matching tags these commands can be used tfirst go to first match count tprevious go to count previous match count tnext go to count next match tlast go to last match If count is omitted then one is used GUESSING TAG NAMES Command line completion is a good way to avoid typing a long tag name Just type the first bit and press lt Tab gt tag write lt Tab gt You will get the first match If it s not the one you want press lt Tab gt until you find the right one
211. iable to indicate that the functions have been loaded When sourcing the file again first unload the functions Example This is the XXX package if exists XXxX_loaded delfun XXX one delfun XXX_two endif function XXX onela body of function endfun function XXX_two b body of function endfun let XXX loaded 1 41 10 Writing a plugin write plugin You can write a Vim script in such a way that many people can use it This is called a plugin Vim users can drop your script in their plugin directory and use its features right away add plugin There are actually two types of plugins global plugins For all types of files filetype plugins Only for files of a specific type In this section the first type is explained Most items are also relevant for writing filetype plugins The specifics for filetype plugins are in the next section write filetype plugin NAME First of all you must choose a name for your plugin The features provided by the plugin should be clear from its name And it should be unlikely that someone else writes a plugin with the same name but which does something different And please limit the name to 8 characters to avoid problems on old Windows systems A script that corrects typing mistakes could be called typecorr vim We will use it here as an example For the plugin to work for everybody it should follow a few guidelines This will be explained step by step The complet
212. ices Swap file main c swp already exists O pen Read Only E dit anyway R ecover Q uit D elete it O Open the file readonly Use this when you just want to view the file and don t need to recover it You might want to use this when you know someone else is editing the file but you just want to look in it and not make changes E Edit the file anyway Use this with caution If the file is being edited in another Vim you might end up with two versions of the file Vim will try to warn you when this happens but better be safe then sorry R Recover the file from the swap file Use this if you know that the swap file contains changes that you want to recover Q Quit This avoids starting to edit the file Use this if there is another Vim editing the same file When you just started Vim this will exit Vim When starting Vim with files in several windows Vim quits only if there is a swap file for the first one When using an edit command the file will not be loaded and you are taken back to the previously edited file D Delete the swap file Use this when you are sure you no longer need it For example when it doesn t contain changes or when the file itself is newer than the swap file On Unix this choice is only offered when the process that created the vim_doc txt Page 80 swap file does not appear to be running If you do not get the dialog you are running a version of Vim that does not support it you will have to do
213. in runtimepath first Then use this in vim after filetype vim which is found last augroup filetypedetect au BufNewFile BufRead usr share scripts setf ruby augroup END What will happen now is that Vim searches for filetype vim files in each directory in runtimepath First vim filetype vim is found The autocommand to catch txt files is defined there Then Vim finds the filetype vim file in SVIMRUNTIME which is halfway runtimepath Finally vim after filetype vim is found and the autocommand for detecting ruby files in usr share scripts is added When you now edit usr share scripts README txt the autocommands are checked in the order in which they were defined The txt pattern matches thus setf text is executed to set the filetype to text The pattern for ruby matches too and the setf ruby is executed But since filetype was already set to text nothing happens here When you edit the file usr share scripts foobar the same autocommands are checked Only the one for ruby matches and setf ruby sets filetype to ruby RECOGNIZING BY CONTENTS If your file cannot be recognized by its file name you might be able to recognize it by its contents For example many script files start witha line like 1 bin xyz To recognize this script create a file Scripts vim in your runtime directory same place where filetype vim goes It might look like this if did filetype finish vim_doc txt Page 2
214. in for a word that completes the word before the cursor Since there is nothing in front of the cursor it finds the first word backwards which is ch array Typing CTRL P again vim_doc txt Page 111 gives you the next word that matches in this case total A third CTRL P searches further back If there is nothing else it causes the editor to run out of words so it returns to the original text which is nothing A fourth CTRL P causes the editor to start over again with ch array To search forward use CTRL N Since the search wraps around the end of the file CTRL N and CTRL P will find the same matches but in a different sequence Hint CTRL N is Next match and CTRL P is Previous match The Vim editor goes through a lot of effort to find words to complete By default it searches the following places Current file Files in other windows Other loaded files hidden buffers Files which are not loaded inactive buffers Tag files All files included by the current file NUP WNEH OPTIONS You can customize the search order with the complete option The ignorecase option is used When it is set case differences are ignored when searching for matches A special option for completion is infercase This is useful to find matches while ignoring case ignorecase must be set but still using the case of the word typed so far Thus if you type For and Vim finds a match fortunately it will result in Fortunately
215. in list Also see load plugins add global plugin vim_doc txt Page 37 You can add a global plugin to add functionality that will always be present when you use Vim There are only two steps for adding a global plugin 1 Get a copy of the plugin 2 Drop it in the right directory GETTING A GLOBAL PLUGIN Where can you find plugins Some come with Vim You can find them in the directory SVIMRUNTIME macros and its sub directories Download from the net check out http vim sf net They are sometimes posted in a Vim maillist You could write one yourself see write plugin USING A GLOBAL PLUGIN First read the text in the plugin itself to check for any special conditions Then copy the file to your plugin directory system plugin directory Unix vim plugin PC and OS 2 SHOME vimfiles plugin or S VIM vimfiles plugin Amiga s vimfiles plugin Macintosh SVIM vimfiles plugin Mac OS X vim plugin RISC OS Choices vimfiles plugin Example for Unix assuming you didn t have a plugin directory yet mkdir vim mkdir vim plugin cp usr local share vim vim60 macros justify vim vim plugin That s all Now you can use the commands defined in this plugin to justify text FILETYPE PLUGINS add filetype plugin ftplugins The Vim distribution comes with a set of plugins for different filetypes that you can start using with this command filetype plugin on That s all See vimrc filetype If y
216. ind swap files in any other directories though it doesn t search the directory tree The output could look like this Swap files found In current directory Ls main c swp owned by mool dated Tue May 29 21 00 25 2001 file name mool vim vim6 src main c modified YES user name mool host name masaka moolenaar net process ID 12525 In directory tmp none In directory var tmp none In directory tmp none If there are several swap files that look like they may be the one you want to use a list is given of these swap files and you are requested to enter the number of the one you want to use Carefully look at the dates to decide which one you want to use In case you don t know which one to use just try them one by one and check the resulting files if they are what you expected USING A SPECIFIC SWAP FILE If you know which swap file needs to be used you can recover by giving the swap file name Vim will then finds out the name of the original file from the swap file Example vim r help txt swo This is also handy when the swap file is in another directory than expected If this still does not work see what file names Vim reports and rename the files accordingly Check the directory option to see where Vim may have put the swap file Vim tries to find the swap file by searching the directories in the dir option looking for files that match filename sw If wildcard expansion doesn t work
217. ing the text ina file If you use the standard input to read text from you can use the s argument to read a script producer vim S change vim NORMAL MODE SCRIPTS If you really want to use Normal mode commands in a script you can use it like this vim s script file txt _s has a different meaning when it is used without e Here it means to source the script as Normal mode commands When used with e it means to be silent and doesn t use the next argument as a file name The commands in script are executed like you typed them Don t forget that a line break is interpreted as pressing lt Enter gt In Normal mode that moves the cursor to the next line To create the script you can edit the script file and type the commands You need to imagine what the result would be which can be a bit difficult Another way is to record the commands while you perform them manually This is how you do that vim w script file txt All typed keys will be written to Script If you make a small mistake you can just continue and remember to edit the script later The w argument appends to an existing script That is good when you want to record the script bit by bit If you want to start from scratch and start all over use the W argument It overwrites any existing file Next chapter usr_27 txt Search commands and patterns vim_doc txt Page 128 Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 129 tus
218. ing in a long string strlen length of a string substitute substitute a pattern match with a string submatch get a specific match in a substitute strpart get part of a string expand expand special keywords type type of a variable Working with text in the current buffer byte2line get line number at a specific byte count line2byte byte count at a specific line col column number of the cursor or a mark virtcol screen column of the cursor or a mark line line number of the cursor or mark wincol window column number of the cursor winline window line number of the cursor getline get a line from the buffer setline replace a line in the buffer append append string below line 1lnum indent indent of a specific line cindent indent according to C indenting lispindent indent according to Lisp indenting nextnonblank find next non blank line prevnonblank find previous non blank line search find a match for a pattern searchpair find the other end of a start skip end System functions and manipulation of files browse put up a file requester glob expand wildcards globpath expand wildcards in a number of directories resolve find out where a shortcut points to fnamemodify modify a file name executable check if an executable program exists filereadable check if a file can be read vim doc Buffers Folding txt isdirectory getcwd getfsize
219. is found it is displayed This uses the normal pager to scroll through the text mostly the more program When you get to the end pressing lt Enter gt will get you back into Vim A disadvantage is that you can t see the man page and the text you are working on at the same time There is a trick to make the man page appear in a Vim window First load the man filetype plugin source SVIMRUNTIME ftplugin man vim Put this command in your vimre file if you intend to do this often Now you can use the Man command to open a window on a man page Man csh You can scroll around and the text is highlighted This allows you to find the help you were looking for Use CTRL W w to jump to the window with the text you were working on To find a man page in a specific section put the section number first For example to look in section 3 for echo Man 3 echo To jump to another man page which is in the text with the typical form word 1 press CTRL on it Further Man commands will use the same window To display a man page for the word under the cursor use this K If you redefined the lt Leader gt use it instead of the backslash For example you want to know the return value of strstr while editing this line if strstr anput sap lt Move the cursor to somewhere on strstr and type K A window will open to display the man page for strstr 12 7 Trim blanks Some people find spaces
220. is is very useful if the meaning of the picture isn t that obvious Example tmenu ToolBar Make Run make in the current directory Pay attention to the case used Toolbar and toolbar are different from ToolBar To remove a tooltip use the tunmenu command The toolbar option can be used to display text instead of a bitmap or both text and a bitmap Most people use just the bitmap since the text takes quite a bit of space POPUP MENU The popup menu pops up where the mouse pointer is On MS Windows you activate it by clicking the right mouse button Then you can select an item with the left mouse button On Unix the popup menu is used by pressing and holding the right mouse button The popup menu only appears when the mousemodel has been set to popup or popup _setpos The difference between the two is that popup _setpos moves the cursor to the mouse pointer position When clicking inside a selection the selection will be used unmodified When there is a selection but you click outside of it the selection is removed There is a separate popup menu for each mode Thus there are never grey items like in the normal menus What is the meaning of life the universe and everything 42 Douglas Adams the only person who knew what this question really was about is now dead unfortunately So now you might wonder what the meaning of death TS ces Next chapter usr 43 txt Using filetypes Copyright see manual
221. is isa good way to check if you didn t forget an endif When you are somewhere inside a if endif you can jump to the start of it with H If you are not after a if or ifdef Vim will beep To jump forward to the next else or endif use These two commands skip any if endif blocks that it encounters Example if defined HAS INC_H a a inc ifdef USE THEME a s 3 endif set_width a With the cursor in the last line moves to the first line The ifdef endif block in the middle is skipped MOVING IN CODE BLOCKS In C code blocks are enclosed in These can get pretty long To move to the start of the outer block use the command Use to find the end vim_doc txt This assumes that the and are in the first column The command moves to the start of the current block pairs of at the same level jumps to the end An overview function int a gt if a gt I for F gt foo 32 if bar a 4 break J lt foobar a lt When writing C or Java the outer block is for the class of is for a method When somewhere inside a class use previous start of a method m m Additionally forward to the end of a function in the first column int funcl void return 1 gt int func2 void gt i if flag start return flag
222. it HIDDEN BUFFERS Suppose you are editing the file one txt and need to edit the file two txt You could simply use edit two txt but since you made changes to one txt that won t work You also don t want to write one txt yet Vim has a solution for you hide edit two txt The buffer one txt disappears from the screen but Vim still knows that you are editing this buffer so it keeps the modified text This is called a hidden buffer The buffer contains text but you can t see it The hide command argument is another command It makes that command behave like the hidden option was set You could also set this option yourself The effect is that when any buffer is abandoned it becomes hidden Be careful When you have hidden buffers with changes don t exit Vim without making sure you have saved all the buffers INACTIVE BUFFERS When a buffer has been used once Vim remembers some information about it When it is not displayed in a window and it is not hidden it is still in the buffer list This is called an inactive buffer Overview Active Appears in a window text loaded Hidden Not in a window text loaded Inactive Not in a window no text loaded The inactive buffers are remembered because Vim keeps information about them like marks And remembering the file name is useful too so that you can see which files you have edited And edit them again LISTING BUFFERS View the buffer list with this command buffer
223. itches to English You can use this command to switch between Hebrew and English CTRL This only works in Insert mode and Command line mode In Normal mode it does something completely different jumps to alternate file The usage of the keymap is indicated in the mode message if you have the showmode option set In the GUI Vim will indicate the usage of keymaps with vim_doc txt Page 222 a different cursor color You can also change the usage of the keymap with the iminsert and imsearch options To see the list of mappings use this command lmap To find out which keymap files are available in the GUI you can use the Edit Keymap menu Otherwise you can use this command echo globpath amp rtp keymap vim DO IT YOURSELF KEYMAPS You can create your own keymap file It s not very difficult Start with a keymap file that is similar to the language you want to use Copy it to the keymap directory in your runtime directory For example for Unix you would use the directory vim keymap The name of the keymap file must look like this keymap name vim or keymap name _ encoding vim name is the name of the keymap Chose a name that is obvious but different from existing keymaps unless you want to replace an existing keymap file name cannot contain an underscore Optionally add the encoding used after an underscore Examples keymap hebrew vim keymap hebrew_utf 8 vim The contents of th
224. itself Why define it then Well the side effect of using a matchgroup is that contained items are not found in the match with the start item then This avoids that the cCondNest group matches the just after the while or for If this would happen it would span the whole text until the matching and the region would continue after it Now cCondNest only matches after the match with the start pattern thus after the first OFFSETS Suppose you want to define a region for the text between and after an if But you don t want to include the if or the and You can do this by specifying offsets for the patterns Example Syntax region xCond start if s ms e 1 end me s 1 The offset for the start pattern is ms e 1 ms stands for Match Start This defines an offset for the start of the match Normally the match starts where the pattern matches e 1 means that the match now starts at the end of the pattern match and then one character further The offset for the end pattern is me s 1 me stands for Match End S 1 means the start of the pattern match and then one character back The result is that in this text if foo bar Only the text foo bar will be highlighted as xCond More about offsets here syn pattern offset ONELINE The oneline argument indicates that the region does not cross a line boundary For example Syntax region xIfThen start if end then oneline This defines a region tha
225. kes a block of text and filters it through an external program In other words it runs the system command represented by program giving it the block of text represented by motion as input The output of this command then replaces the selected block Because this summarizes badly if you are unfamiliar with UNIX filters take a look at an example The sort command sorts a file If you execute the following command the unsorted file input txt will be sorted and written to output txt This works on both UNIX and Microsoft Windows gort lt input txt soutput txt Now do the same thing in Vim You want to sort lines 1 through 5 of a file You start by putting the cursor on line 1 Next you execute the following command SG The tells Vim that you are performing a filter operation The Vim editor expects a motion command to follow indicating which part of the file to filter The 5G command tells Vim to go to line 5 so it now knows that it is to filter lines 1 the current line through 5 In anticipation of the filtering the cursor drops to the bottom of the screen and a prompt displays You can now type in the name of the filter program in this case sort Therefore your full command is as follows 5Gsort lt Enter gt The result is that the sort program is run on the first 5 lines The output of the program replaces these lines line 55 line 11 line 33 line 22 line 11 gt line 33 line 22 line 44 line 44 line 55
226. le clear and wrong That is the case with the example used here for the cw command The c operator works just like the d operator with one exception cw It actually works like ce change to end of word Thus the space after the word isn t included This is an exception that dates back to the old Vi Since many people are used to it now the inconsistency has remained in Vim MORE CHANGES Like dd deletes a whole line cc changes a whole line It keeps the existing indent leading white space though Just like d deletes until the end of the line c changes until the end of the line It s like doing d to delete the text and then a to start Insert mode and append new text SHORTCUTS Some operator motion commands are used so often that they have been given a Single letter command stands for dl stands for dh stands for ds stands for c stands for cl stands for cc delete character under the cursor delete character left of the cursor delete to end of the line change to end of the line change one character change a whole line NNAUKK WHERE TO PUT THE COUNT The commands 3dw and d3w delete three words If you want to get really picky about things the first command 3dw deletes one word three times the command d3w deletes three words once This is a difference without a distinction You can actually put in two counts however For example 3d2w deletes two words repe
227. le for example with edit vimre Then add a line with the command to set the option just like you typed it in Vim Example Go set hlsearch lt Esc gt G moves to the end of the file o starts a new line where you type the set command You end insert mode with lt Esc gt Then write the file ZZ If you now start Vim again the hlsearch option will already be set 03 9 Simple search patterns The Vim editor uses regular expressions to specify what to search for Regular expressions are an extremely powerful and compact way to specify a search pattern Unfortunately this power comes at a price because regular expressions are a bit tricky to specify In this section we mention only a few essential ones More about search patterns and commands in chapter 27 usr_27 txt You can find the full explanation here pattern BEGINNING AND END OF A LINE The character matches the beginning of a line On an English US keyboard you find it above the 6 The pattern include matches the word include anywhere on the line But the pattern include matches the word include only if it is at the beginning of a line The character matches the end of a line Therefore wassS matches the word was only if it is at the end of a line vim_doc txt Page 23 Let s mark the places where the matches in this example line with x s the solder holding one of the chips melted and the XXX XXX XXX Using the we find
228. le the syntax file must follow a few guidelines Start with a header that explains what the syntax file is for who maintains it and when it was last updated Don t include too much information about changes history not many people will read it Example Vim syntax file Language Maintainer Bram Moolenaar lt Bram vim org gt vim_doc txt Page 216 Last Change 2001 Jun 18 Remark Included by the C syntax Use the same layout as the other syntax files Using an existing syntax file as an example will save you a lot of time Choose a good descriptive name for your syntax file Use lowercase letters and digits Don t make it too long it is used in many places The name of the syntax file name vim filetype b current_syntax the start of each syntax group nameType nameStatement nameString etc Start with a check for b current_ syntax If it is defined some other syntax file earlier in runtimepath was already loaded To be compatible with Vim 5 8 use if version lt 600 syntax clear elseif exists b current syntax finish endif Set b current_syntax to the name of the syntax at the end Don t forget that included files do this too you might have to reset b current_ syntax if you include two files If you want your syntax file to work with Vim 5 x add a check for v version See yacc vim for an example Do not include anything that is a user preference Don t set tabstop expandtab e
229. les Back in the early days the old Teletype machines used two characters to start a new line One to move the carriage back to the first position carriage return lt CR gt another to move the paper up line feed lt LF gt When computers came out storage was expensive Some people decided that they did not need two characters for end of line The UNIX people decided they could use lt Line Feed gt only for end of line The Apple people standardized on lt CR gt The MS DOS and Microsoft Windows folks decided to keep the old lt CR gt lt LF gt This means that if you try to move a file from one system to another you have line break problems The Vim editor automatically recognizes the different file formats and handles things properly behind your back The option fileformats contains the various formats that will be tried when a new file is edited The following command for example tells Vim to try UNIX format first and MS DOS format second set fileformats unix dos You will notice the format in the message you get when editing a file You don t see anything if you edit a native file format Thus editing a Unix file on Unix won t result in a remark But when you edit a dos file Vim will notify you of this tmp test dos 3L 71C For a Mac file you would see mac The detected file format is stored in the fileformat option To see which format you have execute the following command set fileformat The thre
230. lice because my homework was too hard True story LEFT ALIGNMENT Finally there is this command range left margin Unlike center and right however the argument to left is not the length of the line Instead it is the left margin If it is omitted the text will be put against the left side of the screen using a zero margin would do the same If it is 5 the text will be indented 5 spaces For example use these commands 1left 5 2 SLEEt This results in the following I taught for a while One time I was stopped by the Fort Worth police because my homework was too hard True Story JUSTIFYING TEXT Vim has no built in way of justifying text However there is a neat macro package that does the job To use this package execute the following command runtime macros justify vim This Vim script file defines a new visual command _j To justify a block of text highlight the text in Visual mode and then execute _j Look in the file for more explanations To go there do gf on this name SVIMRUNTIME macros justify vim An alternative is to filter the text through an external program Example elEmt 25 3 Indents and tabs Indents can be used to make text stand out from the rest The example texts in this manual for example are indented by eight spaces or a tab You would normally enter this by typing a tab at the start of each line Take this text the first line the second line
231. line lt Down gt then takes you back to newer commands There are actually four histories The ones we will mention here are for vim_doc txt Page 90 commands and for and search commands The and commands share the same history because they are both search commands The two other histories are for expressions and input lines for the input function cmdline history Suppose you have done a set command typed ten more colon commands and then want to repeat that set command again You could press and then ten times lt Up gt There is a quicker way se lt Up gt Vim will now go back to the previous command that started with se You have a good chance that this is the set command you were looking for At least you should not have to press lt Up gt very often unless set commands is all you have done The lt Up gt key will use the text typed so far and compare it with the lines in the history Only matching lines will be used If you do not find the line you were looking for use lt Down gt to go back to what you typed and correct that Or use CTRL U to start all over again To see all the lines in the history shistory That s the history of commands The search history is displayed with this command history CTRL P will work like lt Up gt except that it doesn t matter what you already typed Similarly for CTRL N and lt Down gt CTRL P stands for previous CTRL N for ne
232. ll lt SNR gt 34 NextFile To avoid this text on the command line insert lt silent gt as the first argument amenu lt silent gt Mine Next File call lt SID gt NextFile lt CR gt Don t use lt silent gt too often It is not needed for short commands If you make a menu for someone else being able the see the executed command will give him a hint about what he could have typed instead of using the mouse LISTING MENUS When a menu command is used without a keys part it lists the already defined menus You can specify a menu item or part of it to list specific vim_doc txt Page 201 menus Example amenu This lists all menus That s a long list Better specify the name of a menu to get a shorter list amenu Edit This lists only the Edit menu items for all modes To list only one specific menu item for Insert mode imenu Edit Undo Take care that you type exactly the right name Case matters here But the amp for accelerators can be omitted The lt Tab gt and what comes after it can be left out as well DELETING MENUS To delete a menu the same command is used as for listing but with menu changed to unmenu Thus menu becomes unmenu nmenu becomes snunmenu etc To delete the Tools Make item for Insert mode iunmenu Tools Make You can delete a whole menu with all its items by using the menu name Example aunmenu Syntax This deletes the Syntax menu and all the items in
233. lt CR gt Now you type This triggers the mapping It replaces 5 1 with 5 2 in the first line Then it does a wnext to write the file and edit the next one The mapping ends in This triggers the same mapping again thus doing the substitution etc This continues until there is an error In this case it could be a file where the substitute command doesn t find a match for 5 1 You can then make a change to insert 5 1 and continue by typing again Or the wnext fails because you are in the last file in the list When a mapping runs into an error halfway the rest of the mapping is discarded CTRL C interrupts the mapping CTRL Break on MS Windows DELETE A MAPPING To remove a mapping use the unmap command Again the mode the unmapping applies to depends on the command used unmap Normal Visual and Operator pending vunmap Visual nunmap Normal ounmap Operator pending unmap Insert and Command line lunmap Insert cunmap Command line There is a trick to define a mapping that works in Normal and Operator pending mode but not in Visual mode First define it for all three modes then delete it for Visual mode map lt C A gt gt lt CR gt vunmap lt C A gt Notice that the five characters lt C A gt stand for the single key CTRL A To remove all mappings use the mapclear command You can guess the variations for different modes by now Be careful with this command it can t
234. m is if condition statements endif Only when the expression condition evaluates to true non zero will the statements be executed These must still be valid commands If they contain garbage Vim won t be able to find the endif You can also use else The generic form for this is if condition statements else statements endif The second statements is only executed if the first one isn t Finally there is elseif if condition statements elseif condition statements endif This works just like using else and then if but without the need for an extra endif A useful example for your vimre file is checking the term option and doing something depending upon its value if amp term xterm Do stuff for xterm elseif amp term vt100 Do stuff for a vt100 terminal else Do something for other terminals endif LOGIC OPERATIONS We already used some of them in the examples These are the most often used vim_doc txt Page 179 ones equal to not equal to greater than greater than or equal to less than less than or equal to Vv ooo ooo oo V ll AA The result is one if the condition is met and zero otherwise An example 1f Wiversion gt 600 echo congratulations else echo you are using an old version upgrade endif Here v version is a variable defined by Vim which has the value of the Vim version 600 is for version
235. m looks for For Unix this file is always used vimre For MS DOS and MS Windows it is mostly one of these SHOME vimre SVIM _vimre The vimre file can contain all the commands that you type after a colon The most simple ones are for setting options For example if you want Vim to always start with the incsearch option on add this line you your vimre file set incsearch For this new line to take effect you need to exit Vim and start it again Later you will learn how to do this without exiting Vim This chapter only explains the most basic items For more information on how to write a Vim script file usr_41 txt 05 2 The example vimre file explained vimrce_example vim In the first chapter was explained how the example vimre included in the Vim distribution file can be used to make Vim startup in not compatible mode see not compatible The file can be found here SVIMRUNTIME vimrce_example vim In this section we will explain the various commands used in this file This will give you hints about how to set up your own preferences Not everything vim_doc txt Page 34 will be explained though Use the help command to find out more set nocompatible As mentioned in the first chapter these manuals explain Vim working in an improved way thus not completely Vi compatible Setting the compatible option off thus nocompatible takes care of this set backspace indent eol start This specifies w
236. m_doc txt Page 192 inside a script Outside the script it s not visible This avoids trouble with using the same variable name in different scripts The variables will be kept as long as Vim is running And the same variables are used when sourcing the same script again s var The fun is that these variables can also be used in functions autocommands and user commands that are defined in the script In our example we can add a few lines to count the number of corrections 19 let s count 4 30 function s Add from correct 34 let s count s count 1 35 echo s count corrections now 36 endfunction First s count is initialized to 4 in the script itself When later the s Add function is called it increments s count It doesn t matter from where the function was called since it has been defined in the script it will use the local variables from this script THE RESULT Here is the resulting complete example 1 Vim global plugin for correcting typing mistakes 2 Last Change 2000 Oct 15 3 Maintainer Bram Moolenaar lt Bram vim org gt 4 License This file is placed in the public domain 5 6 if exists loaded typecorr F finish 8 endif 9 let loaded typecorr 1 10 11 l t s save cpo amp epo 12 set cpo amp vim 13 14 iabbrev teh the 15 iabbrev otehr other 16 iabbrev wnat want 17 iabbrev synchronisation 18 synchronization 19 let s count 4 20 21 if hasmapto lt Plug gt Typecor
237. mand 3a lt Esc gt The count of 3 tells the command that follows to triple vim_doc txt Page 14 its effect Similarly to delete three characters use the command 3x The count always comes before the command it applies to 02 7 Getting out To exit use the ZZ command This command writes the file and exits Unlike many other editors Vim does not automatically make a backup file If you type ZZ your changes are committed and there s no turning back You can configure the Vim editor to produce backup files see 07 4 DISCARDING CHANGES Sometimes you will make a sequence of changes and suddenly realize you were better off before you started Not to worry Vim has a quit and throw things away command It is sq Don t forget to press lt Enter gt to finish the command For those of you interested in the details the three parts of this command are the colon which enters Command line mode the q command which tells the editor to quit and the override command modifier The override command modifier is needed because Vim is reluctant to throw away changes If you were to just type q Vim would display an error message and refuse to exit E37 No write since last change use to override By specifying the override you are in effect telling Vim I know that what I m doing looks stupid but I m a big boy and really want to do this If you want to continue editing with Vim The e command relo
238. me 48 57 oe ial ee eae rH Sa ol 2 For other systems the default value is different Thus you can make a search pattern with f to match a file name and it will automatically adjust to the system you are using it on Actually Unix allows using just about any character in a file name including white space Including these characters in isfname would be theoretically correct But it would make it impossible to find the end of a file name in text Thus the default value of isfname is a compromise The character classes are item matches option i identifier characters isident I like i excluding digits k keyword characters iskeyword K like k excluding digits p printable characters isprint P like p excluding digits file name characters isfname F like f excluding digits 27 8 Matching a line break Vim can find a pattern that includes a line break You need to specify where the line break happens because all items mentioned so far don t match a line break To check for a line break in a specific place use the n item the nword This will match at a line that ends in the and the next line starts with word To match the word as well you need to match a space or a line break The item to use for it is _s the _sword To allow any amount of white space the _s word This also matches when the is at the end of a line and word at the start of the nex
239. me to the runtimepath option in your vimrc file if you don t like the default value 2 Create the file vim ftplugin c vim with the contents setlocal softtabstop 4 noremap lt buffer gt lt LocalLeadersc O kee KK K CRS gt lt CR gt lt ESC gt Try editing a C file You should notice that the softtabstop option is set to 4 But when you edit another file it s reset to the default zero That is because the setlocal command was used This sets the softtabstop option only locally to the buffer As soon as you edit another buffer it will be set to the value set for that buffer For a new buffer it will get the default value or the value from the last set command Likewise the mapping for c will disappear when editing another buffer The map lt buffer gt command creates a mapping that is local to the current buffer This works with any mapping command map vmap etc The lt LocalLeader gt in the mapping is replaced with the value of maplocalleader You can find examples for filetype plugins in this directory SVIMRUNTIME ftplugin More details about writing a filetype plugin can be found here write plugin 43 2 Adding a filetype If you are using a type of file that is not recognized by Vim this is how to get it recognized You need a runtime directory of your own See vim_doc txt Page 205 your runtime dir above Create a file filetype vim which contains an autocomm
240. mmand For example let s define autocommands for C programs augroup cprograms autocmd BufReadPost c h set sw 4 sts 4 autocmd BufReadPost cpp set Sw 3 sts 3 augroup END This will do the same as autocmd cprograms BufReadPost c h set sw 4 sts 4 autocmd cprograms BufReadPost cpp set sw 3 sts 3 To delete all autocommands in the cprograms group autocmd cprograms NESTING Generally commands executed as the result of an autocommand event will not trigger any new events If you read a file in response to a FileChangedShell event it will not trigger the autocommands that would set the syntax for example To make the events triggered add the nested argument autocmd FileChangedShell nested edit EXECUTING AUTOCOMMANDS It is possible to trigger an autocommand by pretending an event has occurred This is useful to have one autocommand trigger another one Example vim_doc txt Page 173 autocmd BufReadPost new execute doautocmd BufReadPost expand lt afil e gt r This defines an autocommand that is triggered when a new file has been edited The file name must end in new The execute command uses expression evaluation to form a new command and execute it When editing the file tryout c new the executed command will be doautocmd BufReadPost tryout c The expand function takes the lt afile gt argument which stands for the file name the autocommand was executed for and takes the
241. mmands there is only one short name that works For example the short name of autoindent is ai Thus these two commands do the same thing set autoindent set al You can find the full list of long and short names here option list 20 3 Command line completion This is one of those Vim features that by itself is a reason to switch from Vi to Vim Once you have used this you can t do without Suppose you have a directory that contains these files info txt intro txt bodyofthepaper txt To edit the last one you use the command edit bodyofthepaper txt It s easy to type this wrong A much quicker way is edit b lt Tab gt Which will result in the same command What happened The lt Tab gt key does completion of the word before the cursor In this case b Vim looks in the directory and finds only one file that starts with a b That must be the one you are looking for thus Vim completes the file name for you Now type edit i lt Tab gt Vim will beep and give you edit info txt The beep means that Vim has found more than one match It then uses the first match it found alphabetically If you press lt Tab gt again you get sedit intro txt Thus if the first lt Tab gt doesn t give you the file you were looking for press it again If there are more matches you will see them all one at a time If you press lt Tab gt on the last matching entry you will go back to what you first typed se
242. mode Other possible characters are c Command line mode cabbrev both Insert and Command line mode abbreviate Since abbreviations are not often useful in Command line mode you will mostly use the iabbrev command That avoids for example that ad gets expanded when typing a command like edit ad DELETING ABBREVIATIONS To get rid of an abbreviation use the unabbreviate command Suppose you have the following abbreviation abbreviate f fresh You can remove it with this command unabbreviate f While you type this you will notice that f is expanded to fresh Don t worry about this Vim understands it anyway except when you have an abbreviation for fresh but that s very unlikely To remove all the abbreviations abclear vim_doc txt Page 115 sunabbreviate and abclear also come in the variants for Insert mode ilunabbeviate and iabclear and Command line mode cunabbreviate and cabclear REMAPPING ABBREVIATIONS There is one thing to watch out for when defining an abbreviation The resulting string should not be mapped For example abbreviate a adder imap dd disk door When you now type a you will get adisk doorer That s not what you want To avoid this use the noreabbrev command It does the same as abbreviate but avoids that the resulting string is used for mappings noreabbrev a adder Fortunately it s unlikely that the result of an abbreviation is mapped
243. mple 3w moves three words This figure shows how it works This is a line with example text gt gt gt gt w w W 3w Notice that w moves to the start of the next word if it already is at the start of a word The b command moves backward to the start of the previous word This is a line with example text lt lt lt lt lt b b b 2b b There is also the e command that moves to the next end of a word and ge which moves to the previous end of a word This is a line with example text lt lt gt gt ge ge e e If you are at the last word of a line the w command will take you to the first word in the next line Thus you can use this to move through a paragraph much faster than using 1 b does the same in the other direction A word ends at a non word character such asa or To change what Vim considers to be a word see the iskeyword option It is also possible to move by white space separated WORDs This is not a word in the normal sense that s why the uppercase is used The commands for moving by WORDs are also uppercase as this figure shows ge b w e lt lt gt gt gt This is a line with special separated words and some more lt qo SP e gt gE B W E With this mix of lowercase and uppercase commands you can quickly move forward and backward through a paragraph vim_doc txt Page 17 70S 2 The command moves the cursor to t
244. mplex Reads from start to end like a book 2 The Reference manual Precise description of how everything in Vim works The notation used in these manuals is explained here notation JUMPING AROUND The text contains hyperlinks between the two parts allowing you to quickly jump between the description of an editing task and a precise explanation of the commands and options used for it Use these two commands Press CTRL to jump to a subject under the cursor Press CTRL O to jump back repeat to go further back Many links are in vertical bars like this bars An option name like number a command in double quotes like write and any other word can also be used as a link Try it out Move the cursor to CTRL and press CTRL on it Other subjects can be found with the help command see help txt 01 2 Vim installed Most of the manuals assume that Vim has been properly installed If you didn t do that yet or if Vim doesn t run properly e g files can t be found or in the GUI the menus do not show up first read the chapter on installation usr_90 txt not compatible The manuals often assume you are using Vim with Vi compatibility switched off For most commands this doesn t matter but sometimes it is important e g for multi level undo An easy way to make sure you are using the right setup copy the example vimre file By doing this inside Vim you don t have to check out where it is located How
245. n the GUI in the foreground You can also use gui f THE GVIM STARTUP FILE When gvim starts it reads the gvimre file That s similar to the vimre file used when starting Vim The gvimre file can be used for settings and commands that are only to be used when the GUI is going to be started For example you can set the lines option to set a different window size set lines 55 You don t want to do this in a terminal since it s size is fixed except for an xterm that supports resizing The gvimrc file is searched for in the same locations as the vimre file Normally it s name is gvimre for Unix and SVIM _gvimrce for MS Windows If for some reason you don t want to use the normal gvimre file you can specify another one with the U argument gvim U thisre That allows starting gvim for different kinds of editing You could set another font size for example To completely skip reading a gvimrc file gvim U NONE Next chapter usr_40 txt Make new commands Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 165 usr_ 40 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 29 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Make new commands Vim is an extensible editor You can take a sequence of commands you use often and turn it into a new command Or redefine an existing command Autocommands make it possible to execute commands automatically 40 1 Key mapping 40 2 Defining command line commands 40 3 Autocommands
246. n Publication License v1 0 or later The latest version is presently available at http www opencontent org openpub People who contribute to the manuals must agree with the above copyright notice Trombook Parts of the user manual come from the book Vi IMproved Vim by Steve Oualline published by New Riders Publishing ISBN 0735710015 The Open Publication License applies to this book Only selected parts are included and these have been modified e g by removing the pictures updating the text for Vim 6 0 and fixing mistakes The omission of the frombook tag does not mean that the text does not come from the book Many thanks to Steve Oualline and New Riders for creating this book and publishing it under the OPL It has been a great help while writing the user manual Not only by providing literal text but also by setting the tone and style If you make money through selling the manuals you are strongly encouraged to donate part of the profit to help AIDS victims in Uganda See iccf Next chapter usr_02 txt The first steps in Vim Copyright see manual copyright Page 8 vim_doc txt usr 02 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 May 04 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar The first steps in Vim This chapter provides just enough information to edit a file with Vim Not well or fast but you can edit Take some time to practice with these commands they form the base for what follows
247. n get its definition in the preview window with CTRL W vim_doc txt Page 147 There is a script that automatically displays the text where the word under the cursor was defined See CursorHold example To close the preview window again use this command pclose To edit a specific file in the preview window use pedit This can be useful to edit a header file for example pedit defs h Finally psearch can be used to find a word in the current file and any included files and display the match in the preview window This is especially useful when using library functions for which you do not have a tags file Example psearch popen This will show the stdio h file in the preview window with the function prototype for popen FILE popen P const char const char You can specify the height of the preview window when it is opened with the previewheight option 29 3 Moving through a program Since a program is structured Vim can recognize items in it Specific commands can be used to move around C programs often contain constructs like this ifdef USE POPEN fd pepen ls r else fd fopen tmp w endif But then much longer and possibly nested Position the cursor on the ifdef and press Vim will jump to the else Pressing again takes you to the endif Another takes you to the ifdef again When the construct is nested Vim will find the matching items Th
248. n it s not supported on your system You don t get an error when translated messages are not available Vim will silently fall back to using English To find out which languages are supported on your system find the directory where they are listed On my system it is usr share locale On some systems it s in usr lib locale The manual page for setlocale should give you a hint where it is found on your system Be careful to type the name exactly as it should be Upper and lowercase matter and the and _ characters are easily confused You can also set the language separately for messages edited text and the time format See language DO IT YOURSELF MESSAGE TRANSLATION vim_doc txt Page 218 If translated messages are not available for your language you could write them yourself To do this get the source code for Vim and the GNU gettext package After unpacking the sources instructions can be found in the directory src po README txt It s not too difficult to do the translation You don t need to be a programmer You must know both English and the language you are translating to of course When you are satisfied with the translation consider making it available to others Upload it at vim online http vim sf net or e mail it to the Vim maintainer lt maintainer vim org gt Or both 45 2 Language for Menus The default menus are in English To be able to use your local language they must be translated N
249. n sh Vim will recognize it as a sh filetype The filetype detection is used for syntax highlighting and the other two items below See filetypes 2 Using filetype plugin files Many different filetypes are edited with different options For example when you edit a c file it s very useful to set the cindent option to automatically indent the lines These commonly useful option settings are included with Vim in filetype plugins You can also add your own see write filetype plugin 3 Using indent files When editing programs the indent of a line can often be computed automatically Vim comes with these indent rules for a number of filetypes See filetype indent on and indentexpr autocmd FileType text setlocal textwidth 78 This makes Vim break text to avoid lines getting longer than 78 characters But only for files that have been detected to be plain text There are actually two parts here autocmd FileType text is an autocommand This defines that when the file type is set to text the following command is automatically executed setlocal textwidth 78 sets the textwidth option to 78 but only locally in one file autocmd BufReadPost if line 0 amp line lt line N exe normal g endif Another autocommand This time it is used after reading any file The complicated stuff after it checks if the mark is defined and jumps to it if so The backslash at the start of a
250. n t When including a slash Vim matches the pattern against both the full path of the file home biep readme txt and the relative path e g biep readme txt Note When working on a system that uses a backslash as file separater such as MS Windows you still use forward slashes in autocommands This makes it easier to write the pattern since a backslash has a special meaning It also makes the autocommands portable vim_doc txt Page 172 DELETING To delete an autocommand use the same command as what it was defined with but leave out the command at the end and use a Example autocmd FileWritePre This will delete all autocommands for the FileWritePre event that use the pattern LISTING To list all the currently defined autocommands use this autocmd The list can be very long especially when filetype detection is used To list only part of the commands specify the group event and or pattern For example to list all BufNewFile autocommands autocmd BufNewFile To list all autocommands for the pattern c autocmd c Using for the event will list all the events To list all autocommands for the cprograms group autocmd cprograms GROUPS The group item used when defining an autocommand groups related autocommands together This can be used to delete all the autocommands in a certain group for example When defining several autocommands for a certain group use the augroup co
251. nce of shell commands fg You are right back where you left Vim nothing has changed In case pressing CTRL Z doesn t work you can also use suspend Don t forget to bring Vim back to the foreground you would lose any changes that you made Only Unix has support for this On other systems Vim will start a shell for you This also has the functionality of being able to execute shell commands But it s a new shell not the one that you started Vim from When you are running the GUI you can t go back to the shell where Vim was started CTRL Z will minimize the Vim window instead 21 2 Executing shell commands To execute a single shell command from Vim use command For example to see a directory listing es Idir The first one is for Unix the second one for MS Windows Vim will execute the program When it ends you will get a prompt to hit lt Enter gt This allows you to have a look at the output from the command before returning to the text you were editing The is also used in other places where a program is run Let s take a look at an overview program execute program r program execute jprogram and read its output w program execute program and send text to its input range program filter text through program Notice that the precense of a range before program makes a big difference Without it executes the program normally with the range a number of text lines is fil
252. nd execute it A search command can be used to find something In the previous example the config search command could have been used to find the previous command that contains config It s a bit strange because you are using a command line to search in the command line window While typing that search command you can t open another command line window there can be only one Page 91 Next chapter usr_21 txt Go away and come back Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 92 tusr 21 Cet For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 29 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Go away and come back This chapter goes into mixing the use of other programs with Vim Either by executing program from inside Vim or by leaving Vim and coming back later Furthermore this is about the ways to remember the state of Vim and restore it later 23 al Suspend and resume 21 2 Executing shell commands 21 2 Remembering information viminfo 21 4 Sessions 2145 Views 21 6 Modelines Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents USE 22 txt Finding the file to edit usr 20 txt Typing command line commands quickly usr_toc txt 21 1 Suspend and resume Like most Unix programs Vim can be suspended by pressing CTRL Z This stops Vim and takes you back to the shell it was started in You can then do any other commands until you are bored with them Then bring back Vim with the fg command CTRL Z any seque
253. nge Executing a register allows you to make any changes and then still use a to replay the recorded commands Finally you can use 26 different registers Thus you can remember 26 different command sequences to execute USING REGISTERS The registers used for recording are the same ones you used for yank and delete commands This allows you to mix recording with other commands to manipulate the registers Suppose you have recorded a few commands in register n When you execute this with n you notice you did something wrong You could try recording again but perhaps you will make another mistake Instead use this trick G Go to the end of the file o lt ESc gt Create an empty line np Put the text from the n register You now see the commands you typed as text in the file edits Change the commands that were wrong This is just like editing text 0 Go to the start of the line ny Yank the corrected commands into the n register dd Delete the scratch line Now you can execute the corrected commands with n If your recorded commands include line breaks adjust the last two items in the example to include all the lines APPENDING TO A REGISTER So far we have used a lowercase letter for the register name To append to a register use an uppercase letter Suppose you have recorded a command to change a word to register c It works properly but you would like to add a search for the next word to change This can b
254. nism all commands can be abbreviated How short can a command get There are 26 letters and many more commands For example set also starts with s but s doesn t start a set command Instead set can be abbreviated to se When the shorter form of a command could be used for two commands it stands for only one of them There is no logic behind which one you have to learn them In the help files the shortest form that works is mentioned For example s ubstitute This means that the shortest form of substitute is s The following characters are optional Thus su and sub also work In the user manual we will either use the full name of command or a short version that is still readable For example function can be abbreviated to fu But since most people don t understand what that stands for we will use fun Vim doesn t have a funny command otherwise fun would be confusing too It is recommended that in Vim scripts you write the full command name That makes it easier to read back when you make later changes Except for some often used commands like w write and r read A particularly confusing one is end which could stand for endif endwhile or endfunction Therefore always use the full name SHORT OPTION NAMES vim_doc txt Page 88 In the user manual the long version of the option names is used Many options also have a short name Unlike co
255. nly This avoids the trouble with programs that use a different tabstop value Fortunately Vim supports both methods quite well SPACES AND TABS If you are using a combination of tabs and spaces you just edit normally vim_doc txt Page 158 The Vim defaults do a fine job of handling things You can make life a little easier by setting the softtabstop option This option tells Vim to make the lt Tab gt key look and feel as if tabs were set at the value of softtabstop but actually use a combination of tabs and spaces After you execute the following command every time you press the lt Tab gt key the cursor moves to the next 4 column boundary set softtabstop 4 When you start in the first column and press lt Tab gt you get 4 spaces inserted in your text The second time Vim takes out the 4 spaces and puts in a lt Tab gt thus taking you to column 8 Thus Vim uses as many lt Tab gt s as possible and then fills up with spaces When backspacing it works the other way around A lt BS gt will always delete the amount specified with softtabstop Then lt Tabs gt are used as many as possible and spaces to fill the gap The following shows what happens pressing lt Tab gt a few times and then using lt BS gt A stands for a space and gt for a lt Tab gt type result lt Tab gt duce Seat lt Tab gt lt Tab gt 2 HHH gt lt Tab gt lt Tab gt lt Tab gt Dub ass lt Tab gt lt Tab
256. nmap ab This does not exist as a mapped sequence An error will be issued which is very hard to identify because the ending whitespace character in unmap ab is not visible And this is the same as what happens when one uses a comment after an unmap command unmap ab comment Here the comment part will be ignored However Vim will try to unmap ab which does not exist Rewrite it as unmap ab comment RESTORING THE VIEW Sometimes you want to make a change and go back to where cursor was Restoring the relative position would also be nice so that the same line appears at the top of the window This example yanks the current line puts it above the first line in the file and then restores the view vim_doc txt Page 188 map p ma aYHmbgg aP bzt a What this does ma aYHmbgg aP bzt a ma set mark a at cursor position ay yank current line into register a Hmb go to top line in window and set mark b there gg go to first line in file ap put the yanked line above it b go back to top line in display zt position the text in the window as before a go back to saved cursor position PACKAGING To avoid your function names to interfere with functions that you get from others use this scheme Prepend a unique string before each function name I often use an abbreviation For example OW_ is used for the option window functions Put the definition of your functions together in a file Set a global var
257. nsert the i inserts the words A young and then exits insert mode the final lt Esc gt The result A young intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle DELETING A LINE To delete a whole line use the dd command The following line will then move up to fill the gap Found programming UNIX a hurdle vim_doc txt Page 12 DELETING A LINE BREAK In Vim you can join two lines together which means that the line break between them is deleted The J command does this Take these two lines A young intelligent turtle Move the cursor to the first line and press J A young intelligent turtle 02 5 Undo and Redo Suppose you delete too much Well you can type it in again but an easier way exists The u command undoes the last edit Take a look at this in action After using dd to delete the first line u brings it back Another one Move the cursor to the A in the first line A young intelligent turtle Now type xxxxxxx to delete A young The result is as follows intelligent turtle Type u to undo the last delete That delete removed the g so the undo restores the character g intelligent turtle The next u command restores the next to last character deleted ng intelligent turtle The next u command gives you the u and so on ung intelligent turtle oung intelligent turtle young intelligent turtle young intelligent turtle A young intelligent turtle Note If yo
258. nside this window The text in the window will look the same for both versions but with gvim you have extra features like a menu bar More about that later 02 2 Inserting text The Vim editor is a modal editor That means that the editor behaves differently depending on which mode you are in The two basic modes are Page 9 vim_doc txt Page 10 called Normal mode and Insert mode In Normal mode the characters you type are commands In Insert mode the characters are inserted as text Since you have just started Vim it will be in Normal mode To start Insert mode you type the i command i for Insert Then you can enter the text It will be inserted into the file Do not worry if you make mistakes you can correct them later To enter the following programmer s limerick this is what you type iA very intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle After typing turtle you press the lt Enter gt key to start a new line Finally you press the lt Esc gt key to stop Insert mode and go back to Normal mode You now have two lines of text in your Vim window A very intelligent turtle Found programming UNIX a hurdle WHAT IS THE MODE To be able to see what mode you are in type this command set showmode You will notice that when typing the colon Vim moves the cursor to the last line of the window That s where you type colon commands commands that start with a colon Finish this command by pressing the
259. nt count is 1 vim_doc txt Page 175 Then there is another let i command The value used is the expression i 1 This adds one to the variable i and assigns the new value to the same variable The output of the example code is count is 1 count is 2 count is 3 count is 4 If you happen to write a while loop that keeps on running you can interrupt it by pressing CTRL C CTRL Break on MS Windows THREE KINDS OF NUMBERS Numbers can be decimal hexadecimal or octal A hexadecimal number starts with 0x or 0X For example 0x1f is 31 An octal number starts with a zero 017 is 15 Careful don t put a zero before a decimal number it will be interpreted as an octal number The echo command always prints decimal numbers Example rechoe Ox7 036 127 30 A number is made negative with a minus sign This also works for hexadecimal and octal numbers A minus sign is also for subtraction Compare this with the previous example echo 0x7f 036 957 White space in an expression is ignored However it s recommended to use it for separating items to make the expression easier to read For example to avoid the confusion with a negative number put a space between the minus sign and the following number echo 0x7f 036 41 2 Variables A variable name consists of ASCII letters digits and the underscore It cannot start with a digit Valid variable names are counter _aap3 very_long_variable_nam
260. o the buffer exists s Func Check if a function was already defined Also see plugin special the special things used for all plugins 41 12 Writing a compiler plugin write compiler plugin A compiler plugin sets options for use with a specific compiler The user can load it with the compiler command The main use is to set the errorformat and makeprg options Easiest is to have a look at examples This command will edit all the default compiler plugins next SVIMRUNTIME compiler vim Use next to go to the next plugin file The only special item about these files is a mechanism to allow a user to overrule or add to the default file The default files start with vim_doc txt Page 197 21 existe current compiler finish endif ilet current compiler mine When you write a compiler file and put it in your personal runtime directory e g vim compiler for Unix you set the current compiler variable to make the default file skip the settings When you write a compiler plugin for the Vim distribution or for a system wide runtime directory use the mechanism mentioned above When current compiler was already set by a user plugin nothing will be done When you write a compiler plugin to overrule settings from a default plugin don t check current compiler This plugin is supposed to be loaded last thus it should be in a directory at the end of runtimepath For Unix that could be vim a
261. o windows side by side You will only see the line in which you added characters and a few lines above and below it VV VV 123 lines a 123 lines a lt fold text text text text text text text changed text lt changed line text text text lt deleted line text text text text text text 432 lines text 432 lines text lt fold main c main c vim_doc txt Page 58 This picture doesn t show the highlighting use the vimdiff command for a better look The lines that were not modified have been collapsed into one line This is called a closed fold The are indicated in the picture with lt fold Thus the single fold line at the top stands for 123 text lines These lines are equal in both files The line marked with lt changed line is highlighted and the inserted text is displayed with another color This clearly shows what the difference is between the two files The line that was deleted is displayed with in the main c window See the lt deleted line marker in the picture These characters are not really there They just fill up main c so that it displays the same number of lines as the other window THE FOLD COLUMN Each window has a column on the left with a slightly different background In the picture above these are indicated with VV You notice there is a plus character there in front of each closed fold Move the mouse point
262. o your own Vim directory For Unix this should work Imkdir vim colors op SVIMRUNTIME colors morning vim vim colors mine vim This is done from Vim because it knows the value of SVIMRUNTIME 2 Edit the color scheme file These entries are useful term attributes in a B amp W terminal cterm attributes in a color terminal ctermfg foreground color in a color terminal ctermbg background color in a color terminal gui attributes in the GUI guifg foreground color in the GUI guibg background color in the GUI For example to make comments green highlight Comment ctermfg green guifg green Attributes you can use for cterm and gui are bold and underline If you want both use bold underline For details see the highlight command 3 Tell Vim to always use your color scheme Put this line in your vimrc colorscheme mine If you want to see what the most often used color combinations look like use these commands edit SVIMRUNTIME syntax colortest vim o sSOUFCE s You will see text in various color combinations You can check which ones are readable and look nice 06 4 With colors or without colors Displaying text in color takes a lot of effort If you find the displaying too slow you might want to disable syntax highlighting for a moment Syntax clear When editing another file or the same one the colors will come back syn off If you want to stop highlighting completely use synt
263. oc The preprocessor directive should end at the end of the line That is why you have used end So what is going wrong The problem is the contained comment The comment starts with and ends at the end of the line After the comment ends the preprocessor syntax continues This is after the end of the line has been seen so the next line is included as well To avoid this problem and to avoid a contained syntax item eating a needed end of line use the keepend argument This takes care of the double end of line matching Syntax region xComment start end contained Syntax region xPreProc start end contains xComment keepend CONTAINING MANY ITEMS You can use the contains argument to specify that everything can be contained For example Syntax region xList start end contains ALL All syntax items will be contained in this one It also contains itself but not at the same position that would cause an endless loop You can specify that some groups are not contained Thus contain all groups but the ones that are listed Syntax region xList start end contains ALLBUT xString With the TOP item you can include all items that don t have a contained argument CONTAINED is used to only include items with a contained argument See syn contains for the details 44 6 Following groups vim_doc txt Page 211 The x language has statements in this form if condition then You
264. ocessing with some arguments The minlines argument tells Vim the minimum number of lines to look backward and maxlines tells the editor the maximum number of lines to scan For example the following command tells Vim to look at least 10 lines before the top of the screen Syntax sync ccomment minlines 10 maxlines 500 If it cannot figure out where it is in that space it starts looking farther and farther back until it figures out what to do But it looks no farther back than 500 lines A large maxlines slows down processing A small one might cause synchronization to fail To make synchronizing go a bit faster tell Vim which syntax items can be skipped Every match and region that only needs to be used when actually displaying text can be given the display argument By default the comment to be found will be colored as part of the Comment syntax group If you want to color things another way you can specify a different syntax group syntax sync ccomment xAltComment If your programming language does not have C style comments in it you can try another method of synchronization The simplest way is to tell Vim to space back a number of lines and try to figure out things from there The following command tells Vim to go back 150 lines and start parsing from there Syntax sync minlines 150 A large minlines value can make Vim slower especially when scrolling backwards in the file Finally you can specify a syntax group
265. of side effects To avoid this we will set the cpoptions option to its Vim default value and restore it later That will allow the use of line continuation and make the script work for most people It is done like this 11 let s save_cpo amp cp 12 set cpo amp vim 42 l t amp po Ss save_cpo We first store the old value of cpoptions in the s save_cpo variable At the end of the plugin this value is restored Notice that a script local variable is used s var A global variable could already be in use for something else Always use script local variables for things that are only used in the script NOT LOADING It s possible that a user doesn t always want to load this plugin Or the system administrator has dropped it in the system wide plugin directory but a user has his own plugin he wants to use Then the user must have a chance to disable loading this specific plugin This will make it possible 6 if exists loaded_typecorr Fi finish 8 endif 9 let loaded typecorr 1 This also avoids that when the script is loaded twice it would cause error messages for redefining functions and cause trouble for autocommands that are vim_doc txt Page 190 added twice MAPPING Now let s make the plugin more interesting We will add a mapping that adds a correction for the word under the cursor We could just pick a key sequence for this mapping but the user might already use it for something else To allow the user to d
266. of the line to the clipboard y Remember y is yank which is Vim s copy command To insert the contents of the real clipboard before the cursor P It s the same as for the current selection but uses the plus register instead of the star register 09 4 Select mode And now something that is used more often on MS Windows than on X Windows But both can do it You already know about Visual mode Select mode is like Visual mode because it is also used to select text But there is an obvious difference When typing text the selected text is deleted and the typed text replaces it To start working with Select mode you must first enable it for MS Windows it is probably already enabled but you can do this anyway set selectmode mouse Now use the mouse to select some text It is highlighted like in Visual mode Now press a letter The selected text is deleted and the single letter replaces it You are in Insert mode now thus you can continue typing Since typing normal text causes the selected text to be deleted you can not use the normal movement commands hjkl w etc Instead use the shifted function keys lt S Left gt shifted cursor left key moves the cursor left The selected text is changed like in Visual mode The other shifted cursor keys do what you expect lt S End gt and lt S Home gt also work You can tune the way Select mode works with the selectmode option Next chapte
267. ommand vim_doc txt Page 47 next If you have unsaved changes in the current file you will get an error message and the next will not work This is the same problem as with edit mentioned in the previous section To abandon the changes next But mostly you want to save the changes and move on to the next file There is a special command for this wnext This does the same as using two separate commands write next WHERE AM I To see which file in the argument list you are editing look in the window title It should show something like 2 of 3 This means you are editing the second file out of three files If you want to see the list of files use this command args This is short for arguments The output might look like this one c two c three c These are the files you started Vim with The one you are currently editing two c is in square brackets MOVING TO OTHER ARGUMENTS To go back one file previous This is just like the next command except that it moves in the other direction Again there is a shortcut command for when you want to write the file first wprevious To move to the very last file in the list last And to move back to the first one again TA TeE There is no wlast or wfirst command though You can use a count for next and previous To skip two files forward 2next AUTOMATIC WRITING When moving around the files and making changes you have to remember to use wri
268. ommand yanks a whole line just like dd deletes a whole line Unexpectedly while D deletes from the cursor to the end of the line y works like yy it yanks the whole line Watch out for this inconsistency Use y to yank to the end of the line a text line yy a text line a text line line 2 line 2 pP line 2 last line last line a text line last line 04 7 Using the clipboard If you are using the GUI version of Vim gvim you can find the Copy item in the Edit menu First select some text with Visual mode then use the Edit Copy menu The selected text is now copied to the clipboard You can vim_doc txt Page 30 paste the text in other programs In Vim itself too If you have copied text to the clipboard in another application you can paste it in Vim with the Edit Paste menu This works in Normal mode and Insert mode In Visual mode the selected text is replaced with the pasted text The Cut menu item deletes the text before it s put on the clipboard The Copy Cut and Paste items are also available in the popup menu only when there is a popup menu of course If your Vim has a toolbar you can also find these items there If you are not using the GUI or if you don t like using a menu you have to use another way You use the normal y yank and p put commands but prepend double quote star before it To copy a line to the clipboard ayy To put text from the clipboard back into the text
269. orm a substitution command on all these files argdo s lt x_cnt gt x_counter ge update The argdo command takes an argument that is another command That command will be executed on all files in the argument list The Ss substitute command that follows works on all lines It finds the word cnt with lt x_cnt s gt s The lt and gt are used to match the whole word only and not px cnt or x_cnt2 The flags for the substitute command include g to replace all occurrences of x cnt in the same line The e flag is used to avoid an error message when x cnt does not appear in the file Otherwise argdo would abort on the first file where x cnt was not found The separates two commands The following update command writes the file only if it was changed If no x cnt was changed to x counter nothing happens There is also the windo command which executes its argument in all windows And bufdo executes its argument on all buffers Be careful with this because you might have more files in the buffer list than you think Check this with the buffers command or ls 26 4 Using Vim from a shell script Suppose you have a lot of files in which you need to change the string _person to Jones and then print it How do you do that One way is to do a lot of typing The other is to write a shell script to do the work The Vim editor does a superb job as a screen oriented editor when
270. ormally this is automatically done for you if the environment is set for your language just like with messages You don t need to do anything extra for this But it only works if translations for the language are available Suppose you are in Germany with the language set to German but prefer to use File instead of Datei You can switch back to using the English menus this way set langmenu none It is also possible to specify a language set langmenu nl_NL ISO_ 8859 1 Like above differences between and _ matter However upper lowercase differences are ignored here The langmenu option must be set before the menus are loaded Once the menus have been defined changing langmenu has no direct effect Therefore put the command to set langmenu in your vimre file If you really want to switch menu language while running Vim you can do it this way source SVIMRUNTIME delmenu vim set langmenu de_ DE ISO_ 8859 1 source SVIMRUNTIME menu vim There is one drawback All menus that you defined yourself will be gone You will need to redefine them as well DO IT YOURSELF MENU TRANSLATION To see which menu translations are available look in this directory SVIMRUNTIME lang The files are called menu_ language vim If you don t see the language you want to use you can do your own translations The simplest way to do this is by copying one of the existing language files and change it First find out the name of your lan
271. orward or backward that many characters For example const b 2 Moves the cursor to the beginning of the match and then two characters to the right Thus it lands on the n REPEATING To repeat searching for the previously used search pattern but with a different offset leave out the pattern that fre Is equal to that e To repeat with the same offset n does the same thing To repeat while removing a previously used offset SEARCHING BACKWARDS The command uses offsets in the same way but you must use to separate the offset from the pattern instead of const 7e zZ The b and e keep their meaning they don t change direction with the use op gm vim_doc txt Page 132 START POSITION When starting a search it normally starts at the cursor position When you specify a line offset this can cause trouble For example feonst 2 This finds the next word const and then moves two lines up If you use n to search again Vim could start at the current position and find the same Const match Then using the offset again you would be back where you started You would be stuck It could be worse Suppose there is another match with const in the next line Then repeating the forward search would find this match and move two lines up Thus you would actually move the cursor back When you specify a character offset Vim will compensate for this Thus the search starts a few characters fo
272. ou are missing a plugin for a filetype you are using or you found a better one you can add it There are two steps for adding a filetype plugin 1 Get a copy of the plugin 2 Drop it in the right directory GETTING A FILETYPE PLUGIN You can find them in the same places as the global plugins Watch out if the type of file is mentioned then you know if the plugin is a global ora filetype one The scripts in SVIMRUNTIME macros are global ones the filetype plugins are in VIMRUNTIME ftplugin USING A FILETYPE PLUGIN ftplugin name You can add a filetype plugin by dropping it in the right directory The name of this directory is in the same directory mentioned above for global plugins but the last part is ftplugin Suppose you have found a plugin for the stuff filetype and you are on Unix Then you can move this file to the ftplugin directory mv thefile vim ftplugin stuff vim If that file already exists you already have a plugin for stuff You might vim_doc txt Page 38 want to check if the existing plugin doesn t conflict with the one you are adding If it s OK you can give the new one another name mv thefile vim ftplugin stuff_too vim The underscore is used to separate the name of the filetype from the rest which can be anything If you would use otherstuff vim it wouldn t work it would be loaded for the otherstuff filetype On MS DOS you cannot use long filenames You would run into trouble if you add a s
273. ou use for mapping see map which keys MAPPING AND MODES The map command defines remapping for keys in Normal mode You can also define mappings for other modes For example imap applies to Insert mode You can use it to insert a date below the cursor imap lt F2 gt lt CR gt Date lt Esc gt read date lt CR gt kJ It looks a lot like the mapping for lt F2 gt in Normal mode only the start is different The lt F2 gt mapping for Normal mode is still there Thus you can map the same key differently for each mode Notice that although this mapping starts in Insert mode it ends in Normal mode If you want it to continue in Insert mode append a a to the mapping Here is an overview of map commands and in which mode they work map Normal Visual and Operator pending vmap Visual nmap Normal omap Operator pending map Insert and Command line imap Insert cmap Command line vim_doc txt Page 166 Operator pending mode is when you typed an operator character such as d or y and you are expected to type the motion command or a text object Thus when you type dw the w is entered in operator pending mode Suppose that you want to define lt F7 gt so that the command d lt F7 gt deletes a C program block text enclosed in curly braces Similarly y lt F7 gt would yank the program block into the unnamed register Therefore what you need to do is to define lt F7 gt to select the current pro
274. ow get the window number of a specific buffer get the buffer number of a specific window get a variable value from a specific buffer set a variable in a specific buffer get a variable value from a specific window set a variable in a specific window check for a closed fold at a specific line check for the fold level at a specific line generate the line displayed for a closed fold check if a highlight group exists get ID of a highlight group get syntax ID at a specific position get a specific attribute of a syntax ID get translated syntax ID add an item to a history delete an item from a history get an item from a history get highest index of a history list let the user make a choice get a character from the user get modifiers for the last typed character get a line from the user get a line from the user without showing it get a line from the user in a dialog return the list of server names send command characters to a Vim server evaluate an expression in a Vim server send a reply to a client of a Vim server check if there is a reply from a Vim server read a reply from a Vim server move the Vim window to the foreground move the Vim server window to the foreground get current editing mode last visual mode used check if a mapping exists check if a matching mapping exists get rhs of a mapping check if a variable function etc exists check if a feature is supported in Vim vim_doc txt Page 183 cscope_ conne
275. ow type a text like example as soon as you type the Vim will briefly move the cursor to the matching keep it there for half a second and move back to where you were typing In case there is not matching Vim will beep Then you know that you might have forgotten the somewhere or typed a too many The match will also be shown for and pairs You don t have to wait with typing the next character as soon as Vim sees it the cursor will move back and inserting continues as before You can change the time Vim waits with the matchtime option For example to make Vim wait one and a half second set matchtime 15 The time is specified in tenths of a second 24 3 Completion Vim can automatically complete words on insertion You type the first part of a word press CTRL P and Vim guesses the rest Suppose for example that you are creating a C program and want to type in the following total ch_array 0 ch_array 1 ch_array 2 You start by entering the following total ch_array 0 ch_ At this point you tell Vim to complete the word using the command CTRL P Vim searches for a word that starts with what s in front of the cursor In this case it is ch_ which matches with the word ch array So typing CTRL P gives you the following total ch_array 0 ch array After a little more typing you get this ending in a space total ch_array 0 ch_array 1 If you now type CTRL P Vim will search aga
276. ple forever amp This matches for in forever It will not match fortuin for example 27 6 Character ranges To match a b or c you could use a b c When you want to match all letters from a to z this gets very long There is a shorter method a z The construct matches a single character Inside you specify which characters to match You can include a list of characters like this 0123456789abcdef This will match any of the characters included For consecutive characters you can specify the range 0 3 stands for 0123 w z stands for wxyz Thus the same command as above can be shortened to vim_doc txt Page 134 0 9a To match the character itself make it the first or last one in the range These special characters are accepted to make it easier to use them inside a range they can actually be used anywhere in the search pattern e lt Esc gt t lt Tab gt xr lt CR gt b lt BS gt There are a few more special cases for ranges see for the whole story COMPLEMENTED RANGE To avoid matching a specific character use at the start of the range The item then matches everything but the characters included Example gt u a double quote any character that is not a double quote as many as possible a double quote again This matches foo and 3 x including the double quotes PREDEFINED RANGES A number of
277. pose you want to edit all the C program files that contain the word frame_counter To do this you use the command vim grep 1 frame counter c Let s look at this command in detail The grep command searches through a set of files for a given word Because the l argument is specified the command will only list the files containing the word and not print the matching lines The word it is searching for is frame_counter Actually this can be any regular expression Note What grep uses for regular expressions is not exactly the same as what Vim uses The entire command is enclosed in backticks This tells the UNIX shell to run this command and pretend that the results were typed on the command line So what happens is that the grep command is run and produces a list of files these files are put on the Vim command line This results in Vim editing the file list that is the output of grep You can then use commands like next and first to browse through the files FINDING EACH LINE The above command only finds the files in which the word is found You still have to find the word within the files Vim has a built in command that you can use to search a set of files fora given string If you want to find all occurrences of error _ string in all C program files for example enter the following command grep error string c This causes Vim to search for the string error_string in all the specified files c
278. pressing CTRL D For example pressing CTRL D after set is results in set is incsearch isfname isident iskeyword isprint set is Vim lists the matches and then comes back with the text you typed You can now check the list for the item you wanted If it isn t there you can use lt BS gt to correct the word If there are many matches type a few more characters before pressing lt Tab gt to complete the rest If you have watched carefully you will have noticed that incsearch doesn t start with is In this case is stands for the short name of incsearch Many options have a short and a long name Vim is clever enough to know that you might have wanted to expand the short name of the option into the long name THERE IS MORE The CTRL L command completes the word to the longest unambiguous string If you type edit i and there are files info txt and info _backup txt you will get edit info The wildmode option can be used to change the way completion works The wildmenu option can be used to get a menu like list of matches Use the suffixes option to specify files that are less important and appear at the end of the list of files The wildignore option specifies files that are not listed at all More about all of this here cmdline completion 20 4 Command line history In chapter 3 we briefly mentioned the history The basics are that you can use the lt Up gt key to recall an older command
279. programs and when printing the indent will also be wrong Therefore it is recommended to keep tabstop at eight all the time That s the standard value everywhere CHANGING TABS You edit a file which was written with a tabstop of 3 In Vim it looks ugly because it uses the normal tabstop value of 8 You can fix this by setting tabstop to 3 But you have to do this every time you edit this file Vim can change the use of tabstops in your file First set tabstop to make the indents look good then use the retab command set tabstop 3 retab 8 The retab command will change tabstop to 8 while changing the text such that it looks the same It changes spans of white space into tabs and spaces for this You can now write the file Next time you edit it the indents will be right without setting an option Warning When using retab on a program it may change white space inside a string constant Therefore it s a good habit to use t instead of a real tab 25 4 Dealing with long lines Sometimes you will be editing a file that is wider than the number of columns in the window When that occurs Vim wraps the lines so that everything fits on the screen If you switch the wrap option off each line in the file shows up as one line on the screen Then the ends of the long lines disappear off the screen to the right vim_doc txt Page 121 When you move the cursor to a character that can t be seen Vim will scroll
280. pup menus There are two special menus ToolBar and PopUp Items that start with these names do not appear in the normal menu bar TOOLBAR The toolbar appears only when the T flag is included in the guioptions option The toolbar uses icons rather than text to represent the command For example the menu item named ToolBar New causes the New icon to appear on the toolbar The Vim editor has 28 built in icons You can find a table here builtin tools Most of them are used in the default toolbar You can redefine what these items do after the default menus are setup You can add another bitmap for a toolbar item Or define a new toolbar item with a bitmap For example define a new toolbar item with tmenu ToolBar Compile Compile the current file o o amenu ToolBar Compile cc 0 r lt CR gt Now you need to create the icon For MS Windows it must be in bitmap format with the name Compile bmp For Unix XPM format is used the file name is Compile xpm The size must be 18 by 18 pixels On MS Windows other sizes can be used as well but it will look ugly Put the bitmap in the directory bitmaps in one of the directories from runtimepath E g for Unix vim bitmaps Compile xpm You can define tooltips for the items in the toolbar A tooltip is a short text that explains what a toolbar item will do For example Open file It appears when the mouse pointer is on the item without moving for a moment Th
281. put one on the command line The commands starting with also have a history That allows you to recall a previous command and execute it again These two histories are separate SEARCHING FOR A WORD IN THE TEXT Suppose you see the word TheLongFunctionName in the text and you want to find the next occurrence of it You could type TheLongFunctionName but that s a lot of typing And when you make a mistake Vim won t find it There is an easier way Position the cursor on the word and use the command Vim will grab the word under the cursor and use it as the search string The command does the same in the other direction You can prepend a count 3 searches for the third occurrence of the word under the cursor SEARCHING FOR WHOLE WORDS If you type the it will also match there To only find words that end in the use the gt The gt item is a special marker that only matches at the end of a word Similarly lt only matches at the begin of a word Thus to search for the word the only lt the gt This does not match there or soothe Notice that the and commands use these start of word and end of word markers to only find whole words you can use g and g to match partial words HIGHLIGHTING MATCHES While editing a program you see a variable called nr You want to check where it s used You could move the cursor to nr and use the command and press n to go along all
282. r for contains xState syntax match xIf if contains xState syntax match xWhile while contains xState You can add new group names to this cluster with the add argument syntax cluster xState add xString You can remove syntax groups from this list as well Ssyntax cluster xState remove xNumber 44 9 Including another syntax file The C language syntax is a superset of the C language Because you do not want to write two syntax files you can have the C syntax file read in the one for C by using the following command runtime syntax c vim The runtime command searches runtimepath for all syntax c vim files This makes the C syntax be defined like for C files If you have replaced the c vim syntax file or added items with an extra file these will be loaded as well After loading the C syntax items the specific C items can be defined For example add keywords that are not used in C Syntax keyword cppStatement new delete this friend using This works just like in any other syntax file Now consider the Perl language It consists of two distinct parts a documentation section in POD format and a program written in Perl itself The POD section starts with head and ends with cut You want to define the POD syntax in one file and use it from the Perl syntax file The syntax include command reads in a syntax file and stores the elements it defined in a syntax cluster For Perl the st
283. r usr_10 txt Making big changes Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 65 usr 10 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 May 04 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Making big changes In chapter 4 several ways to make small changes were explained This chapter goes into making changes that are repeated or can affect a large amount of text The Visual mode allows doing various things with blocks of text Use an external program to do really complicated things TOs Record and playback commands 10 2 Substitution 10 3 Command ranges 10 4 The global command 10 5 Visual block mode 10 6 Reading and writing part of a file 10 7 Formatting text 10 8 Changing case 10 9 Using an external program Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 11 txt Recovering from a crash usr OIER Using the GUI usr_toc txt 10 1 Record and playback commands The command repeats the preceding change But what if you want to do something more complex than a single change That s where command recording comes in There are three steps 1 The fis bowed command starts recording keystrokes into the register named register The register name must be between a and z 2 Type your commands 3 To finish recording press q without any extra character You can now execute the macro by typing the command register Take a look at how to use these commands in practice You have a list of filen
284. r 26 ExE Repeating usi 24 txt Inserting quickly usr itod txt 25 1 Breaking lines Vim has a number of functions that make dealing with text easier By default the editor does not perform automatic line breaks In other words you have to press lt Enter gt yourself This is useful when you are writing programs where you want to decide where the line ends It is not so good when you are creating documentation and want the text to be at most 70 character wide If you set the textwidth option Vim automatically inserts line breaks Suppose for example that you want a very narrow column of only 30 characters You need to execute the following command set textwidth 30 Now you start typing ruler added 1 2 3 12345678901234567890123456789012345 I taught programming for a whi If you type 1 next this makes the line longer than the 30 character limit When Vim sees this it inserts a line break and you get the following il 2 3 12345678901234567890123456789012345 I taught programming for a whil Continuing on you can type in the rest of the paragraph 1 2 3 12345678901234567890123456789012345 I taught programming for a while One time I was stopped by the Fort Worth police because my homework was too hard True story You do not have to type newlines Vim puts them in automatically The wrap option makes Vim display lines with a line break but this doesn t insert a line break in the file REFORMATTING T
285. r 27 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Dec 31 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Search commands and patterns In chapter 3 a few simple search patterns were mentioned 03 9 Vim can do much more complex searches This chapter explains the most often used ones A detailed specification can be found here pattern 27 Ignoring case 27 2 Wrapping around the file end 272 Offsets 27 4 Matching multiple times 27 5 Alternatives 27 26 Character ranges PA eae Character classes 27 28 Matching a line break 239 Examples Next chapter usr_28 txt Folding Previous chapter usr_26 txt Repeating Table of contents usr_toc txt 27 1 Ignoring case By default Vim s searches are case sensitive Therefore include INCLUDE and Include are three different words and a search will match only one of them Now switch on the ignorecase option set ignorecase Search for include again and now it will match Include INCLUDE and IncClUDe Set the hlsearch option to quickly see where a pattern matches You can switch this off again with set noignorecase But lets keep it set and search for INCLUDE It will match exactly the same text as include did Now set the smartcase option set ignorecase smartcase If you have a pattern with at least one uppercase character the search becomes case sensitive The idea is that you didn t have to type that uppercase character so you must
286. r a single user you can use your home directory as the base The files will be placed in subdirectories like bin and shared vim FROM A PACKAGE You can get precompiled binaries for many different UNIX systems There is a long list with links on this page http www vim org binaries html Volunteers maintain the binaries so they are often out of date It isa good idea to compile your own UNIX version from the source Also creating the editor from the source allows you to control which features are compiled This does require a compiler though If you have a Linux distribution the vi program is probably a minimal version of Vim It doesn t do syntax highlighting for example Try finding another Vim package in your distribution or search on the web site FROM SOURCES To compile and install Vim you will need the following A C compiler GCC preferred The GZIP program you can get it from www gnu org The Vim source and runtime archives To get the Vim archives look in this file for a mirror near you this should provide the fastest download ftp ftp vim org pub vim MIRRORS Or use the home site ftp vim org if you think it s fast enough Go to the unix directory and you ll find a list of files there The version number is embedded in the file name You will want to get the most recent version You can get the files for Unix in two ways One big archive that contains everything or four smaller ones that each fi
287. r it THE SCROLLBARS By default there is one scrollbar on the right It does the obvious thing When you split the window each window will get its own scrollbar You can make a horizontal scrollbar appear with the menu item Edit Global Settings Toggle Bottom Scrollbar This is useful in diff mode or when the wrap option has been reset more about that later When there are vertically split windows only the windows on the right side will have a scrollbar However when you move the cursor to a window on the left it will be this one the that scrollbar controls This takes a bit of time to get used to When you work with vertically split windows consider adding a scrollbar on the left This can be done with a menu item or with the guioptions option set guioptions 1 This adds the 1 flag to guioptions 09 2 Using the mouse Standards are wonderful In Microsoft Windows you can use the mouse to select text in a standard manner The X Window system also has a standard system for using the mouse Unfortunately these two standards are not the same Fortunately you can customize Vim You can make the behavior of the mouse work like an X Window system mouse or a Microsoft Windows mouse The following command makes the mouse behave like an X Window mouse behave xterm The following command makes the mouse work like a Microsoft Windows mouse behave mswin The default behavior of the mouse on UNIX systems is xterm
288. r very long line In the short line no text was inserted If the string you insert contains a newline the I acts just like a Normal insert command and affects only the first line of the block vim_doc txt Page 71 The A command works the same way except that it appends after the right side of the block There is one special case for A Select a Visual block and then use to make the block extend to the end of each line Using A now will append the text to the end of each line Using the same example from above and then typing SA XXX lt Esc gt you get this result This is a long line XXX short XXX Any other long line XXX This really requires using the command Vim remembers that it was used Making the same selection by moving the cursor to the end of the longest line with other movement commands will not have the same result CHANGING TEXT The Visual block c command deletes the block and then throws you into Insert mode to enable you to type ina string The string will be inserted in each line in the block Starting with the same selection of the long words as above then typing c LONG lt Escs you get this This is a LONG_ line short Any other _LONG_ line Just like with I the short line is not changed Also you can t enter a newline in the new text The C command deletes text from the left edge of the block to the end of line It then puts you in Insert mode so that you can type in a string
289. r we catch contains E484 This number is guaranteed to stay the same the text may change e g it may be translated When the read command causes another error the pattern E484 will not match in it Thus this exception will not be caught and result in the usual error message You might be tempted to do this vim_doc txt Page 186 stry read templates pascal tmpl soatli echo Sorry the Pascal template file cannot be found sendtry This means all errors are caught But then you will not see errors that are useful such as E21 Cannot make changes modifiable is off Another useful mechanism is the finally command let tmp tempname itry exe Swrite tmp exe Ifilter tmp delete exe read tmp finally call delete tmp endtry This filters the lines from the cursor until the end of the file through the filter command which takes a file name argument No matter if the filtering works something goes wrong in between try and finally or the user cancels the filtering by pressing CTRL C the call delete tmp is always executed This makes sure you don t leave the temporary file behind More information about exception handling can be found in the reference manual exception handling 41 9 Various remarks Here is a summary of items that apply to Vim scripts They are also mentioned elsewhere but form a nice checklist The end of line character depends on th
290. rAdd 22 map lt unique gt lt Leader gt a lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd 23 endif 24 noremap lt unique gt lt script gt lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd lt SID gt Add 25 26 noremenu lt script gt Plugin Add Correction lt SID gt Add PAi 28 noremap lt SID gt Add call lt SID gt Add expand lt cword gt 1 lt CR gt 29 30 function s Add from correct 21 let to input type the correction for a from Ys 1 32 exe labbrev a from to 33 if a correct exe normal viws lt C R gt b e endif 34 let s count s count 1 35 echo s count corrections now 36 endfunction 37 38 if exists Correct 39 command nargs 1 Correct call s Add lt q args gt 0 40 endif 41 42 let amp cpo s save_cpo Line 33 wasn t explained yet It applies the new correction to the word under the cursor The normal command is used to use the new abbreviation Note that mappings and abbreviations are expanded here even though the function vim_doc txt Page 193 was called from a mapping defined with noremap Using unix for the fileformat option is recommended The Vim scripts will then work everywhere Scripts with fileformat set to dos do not work on Unix Also see source crnl To be sure it is set right do this before writing the file set fileformat unix DOCUMENTATION write local help It s a good idea to also write some documentation for your plugin Especially when its behavior can be changed by
291. ranges are used very often Vim provides a shortcut for these For example a Finds alphabetic characters This is equal to using a zA Z Here area few more of these item matches equivalent d digit 0 9 D non digit ggj x hex digit 0 9a fA F X non hex digit 0 9a fA F s white space lt Tab gt and lt Space gt s non white characters not lt Tab gt and lt Space gt 1 lowercase alpha a z L non lowercase alpha a z u uppercase alpha A Z U non uppercase alpha A zZ Note Using these predefined ranges works a lot faster than the character range it stands for These items can not be used inside Thus d 1l1 does NOT work to match a digit or lowercase alpha Use d 1 instead See s for the whole list of these ranges 27 7 Character classes The character range matches a fixed set of characters A character class is similar but with an essential difference The set of characters can be redefined without changing the search pattern For example search for this pattern E The f items stands for file name characters Thus this matches a sequence of characters that can be a file name vim_doc txt Page 135 Which characters can be part of a file name depends on the system you are using On MS Windows the backslash is included on Unix it is not This is specified with the isfname option The default value for Unix is set isfname isfna
292. rds Abbreviate long words to short ones Type characters that aren t on your keyboard 24 1 Making corrections 24 2 Showing matches 24 3 Completion 24 4 Repeating an insert 24 5 Copying from another line 24 6 Inserting a register 24 7 Abbreviations 24 8 Entering special characters 24 9 Digraphs 24 10 Normal mode commands Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 25 txt Editing formatted text usr 23 EXE Editing other files usr_toc txt 24 1 Making corrections The lt BS gt key was already mentioned It deletes the character just before the cursor The lt Del gt key does the same for the character under after the cursor When you typed a whole word wrong use CTRL W The horse had fallen to the sky CTRL W The horse had fallen to the If you really messed up a line and want to start over use CTRL U to delete it This keeps the text after the cursor and the indent Only the text from the first non blank to the cursor is deleted With the cursor on the f of fallen in the next line pressing CTRL U does this The horse had fallen to the CTRL U fallen to the When you spot a mistake a few words back you need to move the cursor there to correct it For example you typed this The horse had follen to the ground You need to change follen to fallen With the cursor at the end you would type this to correct it lt Esc gt 4blraA get out of Insert mode lt Esc gt four wo
293. rds back 4b move on top of the o l replace with a ra restart Insert mode A Another way to do this lt C Left gt lt C Left gt lt C Left gt lt C Left gt lt Right gt lt Del gt a lt End gt four words back lt C Left gt lt C Left gt lt C Left gt lt C Left gt s move on top of the o lt Right gt delete the o lt Del gt insert an a a go to end of the line lt End gt vim_doc txt Page 110 This uses special keys to move around while remaining in Insert mode This resembles what you would do in a modeless editor It s easier to remember but takes more time you have to move your hand from the letters to the cursor keys and the lt End gt key is hard to press without looking at the keyboard These special keys are most useful when writing a mapping that doesn t leave Insert mode The extra typing doesn t matter then An overview of the keys you can use in Insert mode lt C Home gt to start of the file lt PageUp gt a whole screenful up lt Home gt to start of line lt S Left gt one word left lt C Left gt one word left lt S Right gt one word right lt C Right gt one word right lt End gt to end of the line lt PageDown gt a whole screenful down lt C End gt to end of the file There are a few more see ins special special 24 2 Showing matches When you type a it would be nice to see with which it matches To make Vim do that use this command set showmatch When you n
294. re Vim stores text Here we will use the registers named a to z later you will find out there are others Let s copy a sentence to the f register f for First fyas The yas command yanks a sentence like before It s the f that tells Vim the text should be place in the f register This must come just before the yank command Now yank three whole lines to the 1 register 1 for line LSY The count could be before the 1 just as well To yank a block of text to the b for block register vim_doc txt Page 51 CTRL Vj jww by Notice that the register specification b is just before the y command This is required If you would have put it before the w command it would not have worked Now you have three pieces of text in the f l and b registers Edit another file move around and place the text where you want it W fp Again the register specification f comes before the p command You can put the registers in any order And the text stays in the register until you yank something else into it Thus you can put it as many times as you like When you delete text you can also specify a register Use this to move several pieces of text around For example to delete a word and write it in the w register wdaw Again the register specification comes before the delete command q APPENDING TO A FILE When collecting lines of text into one file you can use this command write gt gt logfile This will write the
295. re is an archive with hints from Vim users You might also want to search in the maillist archive 90 5 Uninstalling Vim In the unlikely event you want to uninstall Vim completely this is how you do it UNIX When you installed Vim as a package check your package manager to find out how to remove the package again If you installed Vim from sources you can use this command make uninstall However if you have deleted the original files or you used an archive that someone supplied you can t do this Do delete the files manually here is an example for when usr local was used as the root rm rf usr local share vim vim61 rm usr local bin eview rm usr local bin evim vim_doc txt Page 229 rm usr local bin ex rm usr local bin gview rm usr local bin gvim rm usr local bin gvim rm usr local bin gvimdiff rm usr local bin rgview rm usr local bin rgvim rm usr local bin rview rm usr local bin rvim rm usr local bin rvim rm usr local bin view rm usr local bin vim rm usr local bin vimdiff rm usr local bin vimtutor rm usr local bin xxd rm usr local man manl eview 1 rm usr local man manl evim 1 rm usr local man manl1 ex 1 rm usr local man manl gview 1 rm usr local man mani gvim 1 rm usr local man mani gvimdiff 1 rm usr local man manl rgview 1 rm usr local man manli rgvim 1 rm usr local man manl rview 1 rm usr local man manl rvim 1 rm usr local man manl view 1 rm usr loc
296. resent in formatoptions r insert the star when typing lt Enter gt in Insert mode fe insert the star when using o or O in Normal mode c break comment text according to textwidth See fo table for more flags DEFINING A COMMENT The comments option defines what a comment looks like Vim distinguishes between a Ssingle line comment and a comment that has a different start end and middle part Many single line comments start with a specific character In C is used in Makefiles in Vim scripts For example to make Vim understand C comments set comments The colon separates the flags of an item from the text by which the comment is recognized The general form of an item in comments is flags text vim_doc txt Page 160 The flags part can be empty as in this case Several of these items can be concatenated separated by commas This allows recognizing different types of comments at the same time For example let s edit an e mail message When replying the text that others wrote is preceded with gt and characters This command would work set comments n gt n There are two items one for comments starting with gt and one for comments that start with Both use the flag n This means that these comments nest Thus a line starting with gt may have another comment after the gt This allows formatting a message like this Did you see that site It looks reall
297. rite block char s int cnt int i for i 0 i lt cnt i write line s i CTRL gt void write _line char s while s 0 write char s vim_doc txt Page 144 CTRL gt void write _char char c putchar int unsigned char c The tags command shows the list of tags that you traversed through tags TO tag FROM line in file text 1 1 write line 8 write block c 2 1 write char 7 write line gt Now to go back The CTRL T command goes to the preceding tag In the example above you get back to the write line function in the call to write char This command takes a count argument that indicates how many tags to jump back You have gone forward and now back Let s go forward again The following command goes to the tag on top of the list tag You can prefix it with a count and jump forward that many tags For example 3tag CTRL T also can be preceded with a count These commands thus allow you to go down a call tree with CTRL and back up again with CTRL T Use tags to find out where you are SPLIT WINDOWS The tag command replaces the file in the current window with the one containing the new function But suppose you want to see not only the old function but also the new one You can split the window using the split command followed by the tag command Vim has a shorthand command that does both stag tagname To split the
298. rk it with mt Then move the cursor to the last line in the range and type tal g m E 12 5 Count words Sometimes you have to write a text with a maximum number of words Vim can count the words for you When the whole file is what you want to count the words in use this command g CTRL G Do not type a space after the g this is just used here to make the command easy to read The output looks like this Col 1 of 0 Line 141 of 157 Word 748 of 774 Byte 4489 of 4976 You can see on which word you are 748 and the total number of words in the file 774 vim_doc txt Page 84 When the text is only part of a file you could move to the start of the text type g CTRL G move to the end of the text type g CTRL G again and then use your brain to compute the difference in the word position That s a good exercise but there is an easier way With Visual mode select the text you want to count words in Then type g CTRL G The result Selected 5 of 293 Lines 70 of 1884 Words 359 of 10928 Bytes For other ways to count words lines and other items see count items 12 6 Find a man page find manpage While editing a shell script or C program you are using a command or function that you want to find the man page for this is on Unix Let s first use a simple way Move the cursor to the word you want to find help on and press K Vim will run the external man program on the word If the man page
299. rn a value return 42 Th Ae Notice that the folded line will display the text before the marker This is very useful to tell what the fold contains vim_doc txt Page 141 It s quite annoying when the markers don t pair up correctly after moving some lines around This can be avoided by using numbered markers Example global variables 1 int varA varB functions 1 funcA 2 void funcA funcB ay void funcB i At every numbered marker a fold at the specified level begins This will make any fold at a higher level stop here You can just use numbered start markers to define all folds Only when you want to explicitly stop a fold before another starts you need to add an end marker More about folding with markers in the reference manual fold marker 28 7 Folding by syntax For each language Vim uses a different syntax file This defines the colors for various items in the file If you are reading this in Vim in a terminal that supports colors the colors you see are made with the help syntax file In the syntax files it is possible to add syntax items that have the fold argument These define a fold region This requires writing a syntax file and adding these items in it That s not so easy to do But once it s done all folding happens automatically Here we ll assume you are using an existing syntax file Then there is nothing more to explain
300. rst lt gt df gt delete to gt gt f lt find next lt 9 gt repeat df gt gt fz find next lt gt repeat df gt gt The command works for all changes you make except for the u undo CTRL R redo and commands that start with a colon Another example You want to change the word four to five It appears several times in your text You can do this quickly with this sequence of commands four lt Enter gt find the first string four cwfive lt Esc gt change the word to five n find the next four repeat the change to five n find the next four repeat the change etc 04 4 Visual mode To delete simple items the operator motion changes work quite well But often it s not so easy to decide which command will move over the text you want to change Then you can use Visual mode You start Visual mode by pressing v You move the cursor over the text you want to work on While you do this the text is highlighted Finally type the operator command For example to delete from halfway one word to halfway another word This is an examination sample of visual mode This is an example of visual mode When doing this you don t really have to count how many times you have to press 1 to end up in the right position You can immediately see what text will be deleted when you press d If at any time you decide you don t want to do anything with the highlighted te
301. rward or backward so that the same match isn t found again 27 4 Matching multiple times The item specifies that the item before it can match any number of times Thus a matches a aa aaa etc But also the empty string because zero times is included The only applies to the item directly before it Thus ab matches a ab abb abbb etc To match a whole string multiple times it must be grouped into one item This is done by putting before it and after it Thus this command ab Matches ab abab ababab etc And also To avoid matching the empty string use This makes the previous item match one or more times ab Matches ab abb abbb etc It does not match a when no b follows To match an optional item use Example folders Matches folder and folders SPECIFIC COUNTS To match a specific number of items use the form n m n and m are numbers The item before it will be matched n to m times inclusive Example ab 3 5 matches abbb abbbb and abbbbb When n is omitted it defaults to zero When m is omitted it defaults to infinity When m is omitted it matches exactly n times Examples pa match count 0 1 2 3 or 4 3 4 5 etc 0 1 0 or 1 same as 0 or more same as 1 or more same as 3 vim_doc txt Page 133 MATCHING AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE The i
302. s A command which does the same is not so obvious to list buffers but is much shorter to type 1s The output could look like this vim_doc txt Page 103 1 h help txt line 62 a cle per 21 txt line 1 3 Mee EGC EXE line 1 The first column contains the buffer number You can use this to edit the buffer without having to type the name see below After the buffer number come the flags Then the name of the file and the line number where the cursor was the last time The flags that can appear are these from left to right u Buffer is unlisted unlisted buffer Current buffer Alternate buffer 1 Buffer is loaded and displayed h Buffer is loaded but hidden z Buffer is read only Buffer is not modifiable the modifiable option is off Buffer has been modified EDITING A BUFFER You can edit a buffer by its number That avoids having to type the file name buffer 2 But the only way to know the number is by looking in the buffer list You can use the name or part of it instead buffer help Vim will find a best match for the name you type If there is only one buffer that matches the name it will be used In this case help txt To open a buffer in a new window Sbuffer 3 This works with a name as well USING THE BUFFER LIST You can move around in the buffer list with these commands bnext go to next buffer bprevious go to previous buffer bfirst go to the first buffer blast go
303. s Jack Benny use the following command vim_doc txt Page 114 iabbrev JB Jack Benny As a programmer I use two rather unusual abbreviations labbrev b BRR RRR KK KK KK RRR RR RR RR RR RR RK KK ilabbrev e lt SPACE gt k FH kk k k k KR k k k k KR I I k k k K IO k k k KK HR HK These are used for creating boxed comments The comment starts with b which draws the top line I then type the comment text and use e to draw the bottom line Notice that the e abbreviation begins with a space In other words the first two characters are space star Usually Vim ignores spaces between the abbreviation and the expansion To avoid that problem I spell space as seven characters lt S P a C e gt iabbrev is a long word to type iab works just as well That s abbreviating the abbreviate command FIXING TYPING MISTAKES It s very common to make the same typing mistake every time For example typing teh instead of the You can fix this with an abbreviation abbreviate teh the You can add a whole list of these Add one each time you discover a common mistake LISTING ABBREVIATIONS The abbreviate command lists the abbreviations abbreviate 1 e K K K k k k k k RK KK RR k A k k A k k k k k k RR RK KKK 1 b RK RRR RK KKK KKK RRR RK RK RK RR k k RR RR RR RK KK i JB Jack Benny i ad advertisement teh the The i in the first column indicates Insert mode These abbreviations are only active in Insert
304. s Vim to highlight the start and end of a region with a different highlight group in this case the xParen group Syntax region xInside matchgroup xParen start end The matchgroup argument applies to the start or end match that comes after it In the previous example both start and end are highlighted with xParen To highlight the end with xParenEnd Syntax region xInside matchgroup xParen start matchgroup xParenEnd end A side effect of using matchgroup is that contained items will not match in the start or end of the region The example for transparent uses this TRANS PARENT In a C language file you would like to highlight the text after a while differently from the text after a for In both of these there can be nested items which should be highlighted in the same way You must make sure the highlighting stops at the matching This is one way to do this Syntax region cWhile matchgroup cWhile start while s end contains cCondNest Ssyntax region cFor matchgroup cFor start for s end contains cCondNest Syntax region cCondNest start end contained transparent Now you can give cWhile and cFor different highlighting The cCondNest item can appear in either of them but take over the highlighting of the item it is contained in The transparent argument causes this vim_doc txt Page 212 Notice that the matchgroup argument has the same group as the item
305. s doesn t work for the browse command See file explorer 31 2 Confirmation Vim protects you from accidentally overwriting a file and other ways to lose changes If you do something that might be a bad thing to do Vim produces an error message and suggests appending if you really want to do it To avoid retyping the command with the you can make Vim give you a dialog You can then press OK or Cancel to tell Vim what you want For example you are editing a file and made changes to it You start editing another file with confirm edit foo txt Vim will pop up a dialog that looks something like this Save changes to bar txt YES NO CANCEL Now make your choice If you do want to save the changes select YES If you want to lose the changes for ever NO If you forgot what you were doing and want to check what really changed use CANCEL You will be back in the same file with the changes still there Just like browse the confirm command can be prepended to most commands that edit another file They can also be combined confirm browse edit This will produce a dialog when the current buffer was changed Then it will pop up a file browser to select the file to edit In the dialog you can use the keyboard to select the choice Typically the lt Tab gt key and the cursor keys change the choice Pressing lt Enter gt selects the choice This depends on the system though W
306. s line that separates two windows and drag it up or down To increase the size of a window CTRL W To decrease it CTRL W Both of these commands take a count and increase or decrease the window size by that many lines Thus 4 CTRL W make the window four lines higher To set the window height to a specified number of lines height CTRL W _ That s a number height CTRL W and then an underscore the key with Shift on English US keyboards To make a window as high as it can be use the CTRL W _ command without a count USING THE MOUSE In Vim you can do many things very quickly from the keyboard Unfortunately the window resizing commands require quite a bit of typing In this case using the mouse is faster Position the mouse pointer on a status line Now vim_doc txt Page 55 press the left mouse button and drag The status line will move thus making the window on one side higher and the other smaller OPTIONS The winheight option can be set to a minimal desired height of a window and winminheight to a hard minimum height Likewise there is winwidth for the minimal desired width and winminwidth for the hard minimum width The equalalways option when set makes Vim equalize the windows sizes when a window is closed or opened 08 4 Vertical splits The split command creates the new window above the current one To make the window appear at the left side use vsplit or Veplit t
307. s not on a useful character will search forward to find one Thus if the cursor is at the start of the line of the previous example S will search forward and find the first Then it moves to its match if a s p 7 a gt o 5 03 5 Moving to a specific line If you are a C or C programmer you are familiar with error messages such as the following prog c 33 j undeclared first use in this function This tells you that you might want to fix something on line 33 So how do you find line 33 One way is to do 9999k to go to the top of the file and 32j to go down thirtytwo lines It is not a good way but it works A much better way of doing things is to use the G command With a count this command positions you at the given line number For example 33G puts you on line 33 For a better way of going through a compiler s error list see jusr_30 txt for information on the make command With no argument G positions you at the end of the file A quick way to go to the start of a file use gg 1G will do the same but is a tiny bit more typing first line of a file text text text text text text text text gg 7G text text text text text text text text text text text text V text text text text text text text text G text text text text last line of a file V Another way to move to a line is using the command with a count For example 50 moves you to halfway the file 90
308. s or the preview window is that included files are searched In most cases this results in the right declaration to be found Also when the tags file is out of date Also when you don t have tags for the included files However a few things must be right for I to do its work First of all the include option must specify how a file is included The default value works for C and C For other languages you will have to change it LOCATING INCLUDED FILES Vim will find included files in the places specified with the path option If a directory is missing some include files will not be found You can discover this with this command checkpath It will list the include files that could not be found Also files included by the files that could be found An example of the output Included files not found in path eno As vim h gt lt Functions hs lt clib exec_protos h gt The io h file is included by the current file and can t be found vim h can be found thus checkpath goes into this file and checks what it includes The functions h and clib exec_protos h files included by vim h are not found Note Vim is not a compiler It does not recognize ifdef statements This means every include statement is used also when it comes after if NEVER To fix the files that could not be found add a directory to the path option A good place to find out about this is the Makefile Look out for lines tha
309. s you where the first error occurred Take a look at an example make session Typical make sessions generate far more errors and fewer stupid ones After typing make the screen looks like this make amp tee tmp vim215953 err gcc g Wall o prog main c sub c main c In function main mMain c 6 too many arguments to function do_sub main c At top level main c 10 parse error before make prog Error 1 2 returned wain L1G LEE 3 of 6 too many arguments to function do_sub Hit ENTER or type command to continue From this you can see that you have errors in the file main c When you press lt Enter gt Vim displays the file main c with the cursor positioned on line 6 the first line with an error You did not need to specify the file or the line number Vim knew where to go by looking in the error messages int main int i 3 cursor gt do sub foo i return 0 3 of 12 too many arguments to function do_sub The following command goes to where the next error occurs vim_doc txt Page 153 enext Vim jumps to line 10 the last line in the file where there is an extra When there is not enough room Vim will shorten the error message To see the whole message use cc You can get an overview of all the error messages with the clist command The output looks like this selist 3 main c 6 too many arguments to function do_sub 5 main
310. store the view on the file See restore position for an example IGNORING EVENTS At times you will not want to trigger an autocommand The eventignore option contains a list of events that will be totally ignored For example the following causes events for entering and leaving a window to be ignored set eventignore WinEnter WinLeave To ignore all events use the following command set eventignore all To set it back to the normal behavior make eventignore empty set eventignore Next chapter usr_41 txt Write a Vim script Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 174 usr 41 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Aug 14 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Write a Vim script The Vim script language is used for the startup vimre file syntax files and many other things This chapter explains the items that can be used in a Vim script There are a lot of them thus this is a long chapter 41 1 Introduction 41 2 Variables 41 3 Expressions 41 4 Conditionals 41 5 Executing an expression 41 6 Using functions 41 7 Defining a function 41 8 Exceptions 41 9 Various remarks 41 10 Writing a plugin 41 11 Writing a filetype plugin 41 12 Writing a compiler plugin Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr _42 txt Add new menus usr 40 txt Make new commands usr_toc txt 41 1 Introduction vim script intro Your first experience with Vim scripts is the
311. sure that each fold contains a whole function or a bit less by selecting the right foldmethod Then delete the function with dd move the cursor and put it with p If some lines of the function are above or below the fold you can use Visual selection put the cursor on the first line to be moved hit V to start Visual mode put the cursor on the last line to be moved hit d to delete the selected lines move the cursor to the new position and p ut the lines there It is sometimes difficult to see or remember where a fold is located thus where a zo command would actually work To see the defined folds set foldcolumn 4 This will show a small column on the left of the window to indicate folds A is shown for a closed fold A is shown at the start of each open vim_doc txt Page 139 fold and at following lines of the fold You can use the mouse to open a fold by clicking on the in the foldcolumn Clicking on the or a below it will close an open fold To open all folds at the cursor line use zO To close all folds at the cursor line use zC To delete a fold at the cursor line use zd To delete all folds at the cursor line use zD When in Insert mode the fold at the cursor line is never closed That allows you to see what you type Folds are opened automatically when jumping around or moving the cursor left or right For example the 0 command opens the fold under the cursor
312. t only restored when starting Vim without file arguments c convert the text using encoding n name used for the viminfo file must be the last option See the viminfo option and viminfo file for more information When you run Vim multiple times the last one exiting will store its information This may cause information that previously exiting Vims stored to be lost Each item can be remembered only once GETTING BACK TO WHERE YOU WERE You are halfway editing a file and it s time to leave for holidays You exit Vim and go enjoy yourselves forgetting all about your work After a couple of weeks you start Vim and type o And you are right back where you left Vim So you can get on with your work Vim creates a mark each time you exit Vim The last one is 0 The position that 0 pointed to is made 1 And 1 is made to 2 and so forth Mark 9 is lost The marks command is useful to find out where 0 to 9 will take you MOVE INFO FROM ONE VIM TO ANOTHER You can use the wviminfo and rviminfo commands to save and restore the information while still running Vim This is useful for exchanging register contents between two instances of Vim for example In the first Vim do wviminfo tmp viminfo And in the second Vim do rviminfo tmp viminfo Obviously the w stands for write and the r for read The character is used by wviminfo to forcefully overwrite an existing file When it is omitted and
313. t all folds with three times a shiftwidth indent or more will be closed The lower the foldlevel the more folds will be closed When foldlevel is zero all folds are closed zM does set foldlevel to zero The opposite command zR sets foldlevel to the deepest fold level that is present in the file Thus there are two ways to open and close the folds A By setting the fold level This gives a very quick way of zooming out to view the structure of the text move the cursor and zoom in on the text again B By using zo and zc commands to open or close specific folds This allows opening only those folds that you want to be open while other folds remain closed This can be combined You can first close most folds by using zm a few times and then open a specific fold with zo Or open all folds with zR and then close specific folds with zc But you cannot manually define folds when foldmethod is indent as that would conflict with the relation between the indent and the fold level More about folding by indent in the reference manual fold indent 28 6 Folding with markers Markers in the text are used to specify the start and end of a fold region This gives precise control over which lines are included in a fold The disadvantage is that the text needs to be modified Try it set foldmethod marker Example text as it could appear in a C program foobar int foobar retu
314. t contain I items like I usr local X11 To add this directory use set patht usr local X11 When there are many subdirectories you an use the wildcard Example set patht usr include This would find files in usr local include as well as usr X11 include When working on a project with a whole nested tree of included files the items is useful This will search down in all subdirectories Example set patht projects invent include This will find files in the directories vim_doc txt Page 150 projects invent include projects invent main include projects invent main os include etc There are even more possibilities Check out the path option for info If you want to see which included files are actually found use this command checkpath You will get a very long list of included files the files they include and so on To shorten the list a bit Vim shows Already listed for files that were found before and doesn t list the included files in there again JUMPING TO A MATCH I produces a list with only one line of text When you want to have a closer look at the first item you can jump to that line with the command lt Tab gt You can also use CTRL I since CTRL I is the same as pressing lt Tab gt The list that I produces has a number at the start of each line When you want to jump to another item than the first one type the number first 3 lt Tab gt Will jump
315. t could try to define the same function To avoid this we define the function local to the script by prepending it with s We will define a function that adds a new typing correction 30 function s Add from correct 31 let to input type the correction for a from 32 exe iabbrev a from T to 36 endfunction Now we can call the function s Add from within this script If another script also defines s Add it will be local to that script and can only be called from the script it was defined in There can also be a global Add function without the s which is again another function lt SID gt can be used with mappings It generates a script ID which identifies the current script In our typing correction plugin we use it like this 24 noremap lt unique gt lt script gt lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd lt SID gt Add 28 noremap lt SID gt Add call lt SID gt Add expand lt cword gt 1 lt CR gt Thus when a user types a this sequence is invoked vim_doc txt Page 191 a gt lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd gt lt SID gt Add gt call lt SID gt Add If another script would also map lt SID gt Add it would get another script ID and thus define another mapping Note that instead of s Add we use lt SID gt Add here That is because the mapping is typed by the user thus outside of the script The lt SID gt is translated to the script ID so that Vim knows in which script to look for the Add
316. t on a floppy disk For version 6 1 the single big one is called vim 6 1 tar bz2 You need the bzip2 program to uncompress it If you don t have it get the vim_doc txt Page 224 four smaller files which can be uncompressed with gzip For Vim 6 1 they are called vim 6 1 srcel tar gz vim 6 1 src2 tar gz vim 6 1 rtl tar gz vim 6 1 rt2 tar gz COMPILING First create a top directory to work in for example mkdir vim cd vim Then unpack the archives there If you have the one big archive you unpack it like this bzip2 d c path vim 6 1 tar bz2 tar xf Change path to where you have downloaded the file gzip d path vim 6 1 srel tar gz tar xf gzip d path vim 6 1 srce2 tar gz tar xf gzip d path vim 6 1 rtl tar gz tar xf gzip d path vim 6 1 rt2 tar gz tar xf If you are satisfied with getting the default features and your environment is setup properly you should be able to compile Vim with just this cd vimel sre make The make program will run configure and compile everything Further on we will explain how to compile with different features If there are errors while compiling carefully look at the error messages There should be a hint about what went wrong Hopefully you will be able to correct it You might have to disable some features to make Vim compile Look in the Makefile for specific hints for your system TESTING Now you can check if compiling worked OK make test This will run a s
317. t one s matches white space _s matches white space or a line break Similarly a matches an alphabetic character and _a matches an alphabetic character or a line break The other character classes and ranges can be modified in the same way by inserting a _ Many other items can be made to match a line break by prepending _ For example _ matches any character or a line break matches everything until the end of the file Be careful with this it can make a search command very slow Another example is _ a character range that includes a line break fey Pepe This finds a text in double quotes that may be split up in several lines 27 9 Examples vim_doc txt Page 136 Here are a few search patterns you might find useful This shows how the items mentioned above can be combined FINDING A CALIFORNIA LICENSE PLATE A sample license place number is 1MGU103 It has one digit three uppercase letters and three digits Directly putting this into a search pattern d u u u d d d Another way is to specify that there are three digits and letters with a count d u 3 d 3 Using ranges instead 0 9 A 2 3 0 97 3 Which one of these you should use Whichever one you can remember The simple way you can remember is much faster than the fancy way that you can t If you can remember them all then avoid the last one because it s both more typing and slower to execute FINDIN
318. t starts at if and ends at then But if there is no then after the if the region doesn t match Note When using oneline the region doesn t start if the end pattern doesn t match in the same line Without oneline Vim does _not_ check if there is a match for the end pattern The region starts even when the end pattern doesn t match in the rest of the file CONTINUATION LINES AND AVOIDING THEM Things now become a little more complex Let s define a preprocessor line This starts with a in the first column and continues until the end of the line A line that ends with makes the next line a continuation line The way you handle this is to allow the syntax item to contain a continuation pattern syntax region xPreProc start end contains xLineContinue Syntax match xLineContinue contained In this case although xPreProc normally matches a single line the group contained in it namely xLineContinue lets it go on for more than one line For example it would match both of these lines define SPAM spam spam spam bacon and spam In this case this is what you want If it is not what you want you can call for the region to be on a single line by adding excludenl to the contained pattern For example you want to highlight end in xPreProc but only at the end of the line To avoid making the xPreProc continue on the next line like xLineContinue does use excludenl like this vim_doc txt Page 213 syn
319. t will ask you to enter the same key again You don t need to use the x argument You can also use the normal edit command Vim adds a magic string to the file by which it recognizes that the file was encrypted If you try to view this file using another program all you get is garbage Also if you edit the file with Vim and enter the wrong key you get garbage Vim does not have a mechanism to check if the key is the right one this makes it much harder to break the key SWITCHING ENCRYPTION ON AND OFF To disable the encryption of a file set the key option to an empty string set key The next time you write the file this will be done without encryption Setting the key option to enable encryption is not a good idea because the password appears in the clear Anyone shoulder surfing can read your password To avoid this problem the X command was created It asks you for an encryption key just like the x argument did 7X Enter encryption key Enter same key again LIMITS ON ENCRYPTION The encryption algorithm used by Vim is weak It is good enough to keep out the casual prowler but not good enough to keep out a cryptology expert with lots of time on his hands Also you should be aware that the swap file is not encrypted so while you are editing people with superuser privileges can read the unencrypted text from this file One way to avoid letting people read your swap file is to avoid using one If
320. t won t work For example Say he said hello To get special characters turned into a string properly escaped to use as an expression use lt q args gt command nargs Say echo lt q args gt Now the above Say command will result in this to be executed echo he said hello The lt f args gt keyword contains the same information as the lt args gt keyword except in a format suitable for use as function call arguments For example command nargs DoIt call AFunction lt f args gt lt DoIt aboe Executes the following command Call AFunction a bY erwy LINE RANGE Some commands take a range as their argument To tell Vim that you are defining such a command you need to specify a range option The values for this option are as follows range Range is allowed default is the current line range Range is allowed default is the whole file range count Range is allowed the last number in it is used as a single number whose default is count vim_doc txt Page 170 When a range is specified the keywords lt linel gt and lt line2 gt get the values of the first and last line in the range For example the following command defines the SaveIt command which writes out the specified range to the file save file command range SaveIt lt linel gt lt line2 gt write save_file OTHER OPTIONS Some of the other options and keywords are as follows count number The comman
321. tarting point Another way of using sessions is to create a window layout that you like to use and save this in a session Then you can go back to this layout whenever you want For example this is a nice layout to use VIM main help file Move around Use the cursor keys or h help txt explorer dir dir file No File This has a help window at the top so that you can read this text The narrow vertical window on the left contains a file explorer This is a Vim plugin that lists the contents of a directory You can select files to edit there More about this in the next chapter vim_doc txt Page 96 Create this from a just started Vim with help CTRL W w vertical split You can resize the windows a bit to your liking Then save the session with mksession vim mine vim Now you can start Vim with this layout vim S vim mine vim Hint To open a file you see listed in the explorer window in the empty window move the cursor to the filename and press O Double clicking with the mouse will also do this UNIX AND MS WINDOWS Some people have to do work on MS Windows systems one day and on Unix another day If you are one of them consider adding slash and unix to sessionoptions The session files will then be written in a format that can be used on both systems This is the command to put in your vimre file set sessionoptions unix slash
322. tax region xPreProc start end contains xLineContinue xPreProcEnd Syntax match xPreProcEnd excludenl end contained Syntax match xLineContinue contained excludenl must be placed before the pattern Since xLineContinue doesn t have excludenl a match with it will extend xPreProc to the next line as before 44 8 Clusters One of the things you will notice as you start to write a syntax file is that you wind up generating a lot of syntax groups Vim enables you to define a collection of syntax groups called a cluster Suppose you have a language that contains for loops if statements while loops and functions Each of them contains the same syntax elements numbers and identifiers You define them like this syntax match xFor for contains xNumber xIdent syntax match xIf if contains xNumber xIdent syntax match xWhile while contains xNumber xIdent You have to repeat the same contains every time If you want to add another contained item you have to add it three times Syntax clusters simplify these definitions by enabling you to have one cluster stand for several syntax groups To define a cluster for the two items that the three groups contain use the following command Syntax cluster xState contains xNumber xIdent Clusters are used inside other syntax items just like any syntax group Their names start with Thus you can define the three groups like this syntax match xFo
323. tc These belong in a filetype plugin Do not include mappings or abbreviations Only include setting iskeyword if it is really necessary for recognizing keywords Avoid using specific colors Link to the standard highlight groups whenever possible Don t forget that some people use a different background color or have only eight colors available For backwards compatibility with Vim 5 8 this construction is used if version gt 508 exists did_c_syn_inits if version lt 508 let did c syn inits 1 command nargs HiLink hi link lt args gt else command nargs HiLink hi def link lt args gt endif HiLink nameString String HiLink nameNumber Number ete delcommand HiLink endif Add the display argument to items that are not used when syncing to speed up scrolling backwards and CTRL L Next chapter usr 45 txt Select your language Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 217 tusr 45 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Oct 08 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Select your language The messages in Vim can be given in several languages This chapter explains how to change which one is used Also the different ways to work with files in various languages is explained 45 1 Language for Messages 45 2 Language for Menus 45 3 Using another encoding 45 4 Editing files with a different encoding 45 5 Entering language text Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents
324. te Otherwise you will get an error message If you are sure you always want to write modified files you can tell Vim to automatically write them set autowrite When you are editing a file which you may not want to write switch it off vim_doc txt Page 48 again set noautowrite EDITING ANOTHER LIST OF FILES You can redefine the list of files without the need to exit Vim and start it again Use this command to edit three other files args five c six c seven h Or use a wildcard like it s used in the shell sarge hace Vim will take you to the first file in the list Again if the current file has changes you can either write the file first or use args with added to abandon the changes DID YOU EDIT THE LAST FILE arglist quit When you use a list of files Vim assumes you want to edit them all To protect you from exiting too early you will get this error when you didn t edit the last file in the list yet E173 46 more files to edit If you really want to exit just do it again Then it will work but not when you did other commands in between 07 3 Jumping from file to file A To quickly jump between two files press CTRL on English US keyboards the is above the 6 key Example args one c two c three c You are now in one c next Now you are in two c Now use CTRL to go back to one c Another CTRL and you are back in two c Another CTRL and you are in one c again If you now
325. ted number of Unicode characters Try using the Courier New font You can use the Edit Select Font menu to select and try out the fonts available Only fixed width fonts can be used though Example set guifont courier new h12 If it doesn t work well try getting a fontpack If Microsoft didn t move it you can find it here http www microsoft com typography fontpack default htm Now you have told Vim to use Unicode internally and display text with a Unicode font Typed characters still arrive in the encoding of your original language This requires converting them to Unicode Tell Vim the language from which to convert with the termencoding option You can do it like this let amp termencoding amp encoding set encoding utf 8 This assigns the old value of encoding to termencoding before setting encoding to utf 8 You will have to try out if this really works for your setup It should work especially well when using an input method for an Asian language and you want to edit Unicode text USING UNICODE IN A UNICODE TERMINAL There are terminals that support Unicode directly The standard xterm that comes with XFree86 is one of them Let s use that as an example vim_doc txt Page 220 First of all the xterm must have been compiled with Unicode support See UTF8 xterm how to check that and how to compile it when needed Start the xterm with the u8 argument You might also need so specify a font Example
326. tems so far match as many characters as they can find To match as few as possible use n m It works the same as n m except that the minimal amount possible is used For example use ab 1 3 Will match ab in abbb Actually it will never match more than one b because there is no reason to match more It requires something else to force it to match more than the lower limit The same rules apply to removing n and m It s even possible to remove both of the resulting in This matches the item before it zero or more times as few as possible The item by itself always match zero times It is useful when combined with something else Example a b This matches axb in axbxb If this pattern would be used fa b It would try to match as many characters as possible with thus it matches axbxb as a whole 27 5 Alternatives The or operator in a pattern is Example 00 bar This matches foo or bar More alternatives can be concatenated one two three Matches one two and three To match multiple times the whole thing must be placed in and 00 bar This matches foo foobar foofoo barfoobar etc Another example end if while for This matches endif endwhile and endfor A related item is amp This requires that both alternatives match in the same place The resulting match uses the last alternative Exam
327. tered through the program Executing a whole row of programs this way is possible But a shell is much better at it You can start a new shell this way vim_doc txt Page 93 Shell This is similar to using CTRL Z to suspend Vim The difference is that a new shell is started When using the GUI the shell will be using the Vim window for its input and output Since Vim is not a terminal emulator this will not work perfectly If you have trouble try toggling the guipty option If this still doesn t work well enough start a new terminal to run the shell in For example with xterm amp 21 3 Remembering information viminfo After editing for a while you will have text in registers marks in various files a command line history filled with carefully crafted commands When you exit Vim all of this is lost But you can get it back The viminfo file is designed to store status information Command line and Search pattern history Text in registers Marks for various files The buffer list Global variables Each time you exit Vim it will store this information in a file the viminfo file When Vim starts again the viminfo file is read and the information restored The viminfo option is set by default to restore a limited number of items You might want to set it to remember more information This is done through the following command set viminfo string The string specifies what to save The syntax of this strin
328. text of the current file to the end of logfile Thus it is appended This avoids that you have to copy the lines edit the log file and put them there Thus you save two steps But you can only append to the end of a file To append only a few lines select them in Visual mode before typing write In chapter 10 you will learn other ways to select a range of lines 07 6 Viewing a file Sometimes you only want to see what a file contains without the intention to ever write it back There is the risk that you type w without thinking and overwrite the original file anyway To avoid this edit the file read only To start Vim in readonly mode use this command vim R file On Unix this command should do the same thing view file You are now editing file in read only mode When you try using w you will get an error message and the file won t be written When you try to make a change to the file Vim will give you a warning W10 Warning Changing a readonly file The change will be done though This allows for formatting the file for example to be able to read it easily If you make changes to a file and forgot that it was read only you can still write it Add the to the write command to force writing If you really want to forbid making changes in a file do this vim M file Now every attempt to change the text will fail The help files are like this for example If you try to make a change you get this error message E2
329. text with Visual mode If you then press to start a colon command you will see this 5 amp Now you can type the command and it will be applied to the range of lines that was visually selected When using Visual mode to select part of a line or using CTRL V to select a block of text the colon commands will still apply to whole lines This might change in a future version of Vim The lt and gt are actually marks placed at the start and end of the Visual selection The marks remain at their position until another Visual selection is made Thus you can use the lt command to jump to position where the Visual area started And you can mix the marks with other items S28 This addresses the lines from the end of the Visual area to the end of the file A NUMBER OF LINES When you know how many lines you want to change you can type the number and then For example when you type 5 you will get 44 Now you can type the command you want to use It will use the range current line until 4 four lines down Thus it spans five lines 10 4 The global command The global command is one of the more powerful features of Vim It allows you to find a match for a pattern and execute a command there The general form is range global pattern command This is similar to the substitute command But instead of replacing the matched text with other text the command command is execut
330. the fx command before the searched character Hint t version of this command is Tx To err is human lt To really foul up you can go to the stands for the single character search in the line for the single the following line the command fh Suppose you and the cursor you need a computer to the end of the word really 1 of foul with you need a computer you need a computer except it stops one character To The backward you need a computer Th tn These four commands can be repeated with direction sentence continues Sometimes you will start a search wrong command You type f that you really meant F aborted forward search and doesn t do anything operations not just searches The cursor is never moved to another line gt repeats in the other Not even when the only to realize that you have typed the to search backward To abort a search press lt Esc gt for example only to realize So f lt Esc gt is an lt Esc gt cancels most vim_doc txt Page 18 03 4 Matching a paren When writing a program you often end up with nested constructs Then the S command is very handy It moves to the matching paren If the cursor is on a it will move to the matching If it s on a it will move to the matching This also works for and pairs This can be defined with the matchpairs option When the cursor i
331. the n argument is supplied on the command line no swap file is used instead Vim puts everything in memory For example to edit the encrypted file file txt without a swap file use the following command vim_doc txt Page 107 vim x n file txt When already editing a file the swapfile can be disabled with setlocal noswapfile Since there is no swapfile recovery will be impossible Save the file a bit more often to avoid the risk of losing your changes While the file is in memory it is in plain text Anyone with privilege can look in the editor s memory and discover the contents of the file If you use a viminfo file be aware that the contents of text registers are written out in the clear as well If you really want to secure the contents of a file edit it only ona portable computer not connected to a network use good encryption tools and keep the computer locked up in a big safe when not in use 23 4 Binary files You can edit binary files with Vim Vim wasn t really made for this thus there are a few restrictions But you can read a file change a character and write it back with the result that only that one character was changed and the file is identical otherwise To make sure that Vim does not use its clever tricks in the wrong way add the b argument when starting Vim vim b datafile This sets the binary option The effect of this is that unexpected side effects are turned off For example text
332. the file exists the information is merged into the file The character used for rviminfo means that all the information is used this may overwrite existing information Without the only information that wasn t set is used These commands can also be used to store info and use it again later You could make a directory full of viminfo files each containing info for a different purpose 21 4 Sessions Suppose you are editing along and it is the end of the day You want to quit work and pick up where you left off the next day You can do this by saving your editing session and restoring it the next day A Vim session contains all the information about what you are editing This includes things such as the file list window layout global variables options and other information Exactly what is remembered is controlled by the sessionoptions option described below The following command creates a session file mksession vimbook vim Later if you want to restore this session you can use this command source vimbook vim If you want to start Vim and restore a specific session you can use the following command vim S vimbook vim vim_doc txt Page 95 This tells Vim to read a specific file on startup The S stands for session actually you can source any Vim script with S thus it might as well stand for source The windows that were open are restored with the same position and size as before Mappings an
333. the text to show it This is like moving a viewport over the text in the horizontal direction By default Vim does not display a horizontal scrollbar in the GUI If you want to enable one use the following command set guioptions b One horizontal scrollbar will appear at the bottom of the Vim window If you don t have a scrollbar or don t want to use it use these commands to scroll the text The cursor will stay in the same place but it s move back into the visible text if necessary zh scroll right 4zh scroll four characters right zH scroll half a window width right ze scroll right to put the cursor at the end zl scroll left 4zl scroll four characters left zL scroll half a window width left zs scroll left to put the cursor at the start Let s attempt to show this with one line of text The cursor is on the w of which The current window above the line indicates the text that is currently visible The window s below the text indicate the text that is visible after the command left of it lt current window gt some long text part of which is visible in the window ze lt window gt zH lt window gt 4zh lt window gt zh lt window gt z1 lt window gt 4zl lt window gt zL lt window gt zs lt window gt MOVING WITH WRAP OFF When wrap is off and the text has scrolled horizontally you can use the following commands to move the
334. the user See add local help for how they are installed Here is a simple example for a plugin help file called typecorr txt 1 typecorr txt Plugin for correcting typing mistakes 2 3 If you make typing mistakes this plugin will have them corrected 4 automatically 5 6 There are currently only a few corrections Add your own if you like 7 8 Mappings 9 lt Leader gt a or lt Plug gt TypecorrAdd 10 Add a correction for the word under the cursor 1L 12 Commands 13 Correct word 14 Add a correction for word 15 16 typecorr settings 17 This plugin doesn t have any settings The first line is actually the only one for which the format matters It will be extracted from the help file to be put in the LOCAL ADDITIONS section of help txt local additions The first must be in the first column of the first line You can add more tags inside in your help file But be careful not to use existing help tags You would probably use the name of your plugin in most of them like typecorr settings in the example Using references to other parts of the help in is recommended This makes it easy for the user to find associated help FILETYPE DETECTION plugin filetype If your filetype is not already detected by Vim you should create a filetype detection snippet in a separate file It is usually in the form of an autocommand that sets the filetype when the file name matches a pattern Example au BufNewFil
335. ther gVim position the cursor somewhere and use the Edit Paste menu You will see the text from the real clipboard is inserted USING BOTH This use of both the current selection and the real clipboard might sound a bit confusing But it is very useful Let s show this with an example Use one gVim with a text file and perform these actions vim_doc txt Page 64 Select two words in Visual mode Use the Edit Copy menu to get these words onto the clipboard Select one other word in Visual mode Use the Edit Paste menu item What will happen is that the single selected word is replaced with the two words from the clipboard Move the mouse pointer somewhere else and click the middle button You will see that the word you just overwrote with the clipboard is inserted here If you use the current selection and the real clipboard with care you can do a lot of useful editing with them USING THE KEYBOARD If you don t like using the mouse you can access the current selection and the real clipboard with two registers The register is for the current selection To make text become the current selection use Visual mode For example to select a whole line just press V To insert the current selection before the cursor xD Notice the uppercase P The lowercase p puts the text after the cursor The register is used for the real clipboard For example to copy the text from the cursor position until the end
336. to also wrap use this command set whichwrap b s lt gt This is still only for Normal mode To let lt Left gt and lt Right gt do this in Insert mode as well set whichwrap b s lt gt There are a few other flags that can be added see whichwrap VIEWING TABS When there are tabs in a file you cannot see where they are To make them visible set list Now every Tab is displayed as I And a is displayed at the end of each line so that you can spot trailing spaces that would otherwise go unnoticed A disadvantage is that this looks ugly when there are many Tabs in a file If you have a color terminal or are using the GUI Vim can show the spaces and tabs as highlighted characters Use the listchars option set listchars tab gt trail Now every tab will be displayed as gt and trailing white space as Looks a lot better doesn t it KEYWORDS The iskeyword option specifies which characters can appear in a word set iskeyword iskeyword 48 57 192 255 The stands for all alphabetic letters 48 57 stands for ASCII characters 48 to 57 which are the numbers 0 to 9 192 255 are the printable latin characters Sometimes you will want to include a dash in keywords so that commands like w consider upper case to be one word You can do it like this vim_doc txt Page 41 set iskeyword set iskeyword iskeyword 48 57 192 255 If you look at the new value you will s
337. to look for by using this command syntax sync match sync group name grouphere group name pattern This tells Vim that when it sees pattern the syntax group named group name begins just after the pattern given The sync group name is used to give a name to this synchronization specification For example the sh scripting language begins an if statement with if and ends it with fi if f file txt then echo File exists vim_doc txt Page 215 fi To define a grouphere directive for this syntax you use the following command Syntax sync match shIfSync grouphere shIf lt if gt The groupthere argument tells Vim that the pattern ends a group For example the end of the if fi group is as follows Syntax sync match shIfSync groupthere NONE lt fi gt In this example the NONE tells Vim that you are not in any special syntax region In particular you are not inside an if block You also can define matches and regions that are with no grouphere or groupthere arguments These groups are for syntax groups skipped during synchronization For example the following skips over anything inside even if it would normally match another synchronization method syntax sync match xSpecial More about synchronizing in the reference manual syn sync 44 11 Installing a syntax file When your new syntax file is ready to be used drop it in a syntax directory in runtimepat
338. to the last buffer To remove a buffer from the list use this command bdelete 3 Again this also works with a name If you delete a buffer that was active visible in a window that window will be closed If you delete the current buffer the current window will be closed If it was the last window Vim will find another buffer to edit You can t be editing nothing Even after removing the buffer with bdelete Vim still remembers it It s actually made unlisted it no longer appears in the list from buffers The buffers command will list unlisted buffers yes Vim can do the impossible To really make Vim forget about a buffer use bwipe Also see the buflisted option Next chapter usr_23 txt Editing other files Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 104 tusr 23 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2001 Sep 03 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Editing other files This chapter is about editing files that are not ordinary files With Vim you can edit files that are compressed or encrypted Some files need to be accessed over the internet With some restrictions binary files can be edited as well 23u DOS Mac and Unix files 23 2 Files on the internet 2342 Encryption 23 4 Binary files 2335 Compressed files Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 24 txt Inserting quickly usr 22 tite Finding the file to edit usr_toc txt 23 1 DOS Mac and Unix fi
339. tp rep uses rcp scp uses scp http uses wget reading only Vim doesn t do the communication itself it relies on the mentioned programs vim_doc txt Page 106 to be available on your computer On most Unix systems ftp and rep will be present scp and wget might need to be installed Vim detects these URLs for each command that starts editing a new file also with edit and split for example Write commands also work except for http For more information also about passwords see netrw 23 3 Encryption Some information you prefer to keep to yourself For example when writing a test on a computer that students also use You don t want clever students to figure out a way to read the questions before the exam starts Vim can encrypt the file for you which gives you some protection To start editing a new file with encryption use the x argument to start Vim Example vim x exam txt Vim prompts you for a key used for encrypting and decrypting the file Enter encryption key Carefully type the secret key now You cannot see the characters you type they will be replaced by stars To avoid the situation that a typing mistake will cause trouble Vim asks you to enter the key again Enter same key again You can now edit this file normally and put in all your secrets When you finish editing the file and tell Vim to exit the file is encrypted and written When you edit the file with Vim i
340. tten To tell Vim to redraw the screen CYRD L Next chapter usr_11 txt Recovering from a crash Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 77 usr 11 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2003 Apr 09 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Recovering from a crash Did your computer crash And you just spent hours editing Don t panic Vim keeps enough information on harddisk to be able to restore most of your work This chapter shows you how to get your work back and explains how the swap file is used 13 Basic recovery 11 2 Where is the swap file 11 3 Crashed or not 11 4 Further reading Next chapter Previous chapter Table of contents usr 12 txt Clever tricks usr 10st Making big changes usr_toc txt 11 1 Basic recovery In most cases recovering a file is quite simple assuming you know which file you were editing and the harddisk is still working Start Vim on the file with the r argument added vim r help txt Vim will read the swap file used to store text you were editing and may read bits and pieces of the original file If all is well you will see these messages with different file names of course Using swap file help txt swp Original file vim runtime doc help txt Recovery completed You should check if everything is OK You might want to write out this file under another name and run diff with the original file to check for changes Delete the swp file a
341. tusline 0 never 1 only when there are split windows the default 2 always Many commands that edit another file have a variant that splits the window For Command line commands this is done by prepending an s For example tag jumps to a tag stag splits the window and jumps to a tag For Normal mode commands a CTRL W is prepended CTRL jumps to the alternate file CTRL W CTRL splits the window and edits the alternate file The splitbelow option can be set to make a new window appear below the current window The splitright option can be set to make a vertically split window appear right of the current window When splitting a window you can prepend a modifier command to tell where the window is to appear leftabove cmd left or above the current window aboveleft cmd idem rightbelow ae right or below the current window belowright cmd idem topleft cmd at the top or left of the Vim window botright cmd at the bottom or right of the Vim window Next chapter usr_09 txt Using the GUI Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page 60 vim_doc txt Page 61 usr 09 Cxt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2001 Sep 03 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Using the GUI Vim works in an ordinary terminal GVim can do the same things and a few more The GUI offers menus a toolbar scrollbars and other items This chapter is about these extra things that the GUI offers 09 1 Parts of the GUI
342. u like The same text will be used You can use a count with p and P The text will be repeated as many times as specified with the count Thus dd and then 3p puts three copies of the same deleted line SWAPPING TWO CHARACTERS Frequently when you are typing your fingers get ahead of your brain or the other way around The result is a typo such as teh for the Vim makes it easy to correct such problems Just put the cursor on the e of teh and execute the command xp This works as follows x deletes the character e and places it in a register p puts the text after the cursor which is after the h teh th the x pP 04 6 Copying text To copy text from one place to another you could delete it use u to undo the deletion and then p to put it somewhere else There is an easier way yanking The y operator copies text into a register Then a p command can be used to put it Yanking is just a Vim name for copying The c letter was already used for the change operator and y was still available Calling this operator yank made it easier to remember to use the y key Since y is an operator you use yw to yank a word A count is possible as usual To yank two workds use y2w Example let sqr LongVariable y2w 7 let sqr LongVariable pP let sqr LongVariable LongVariable Notice that yw includes the white space after a word If you don t want this use ye The yy c
343. u type u twice and the result is that you get the same text back you have Vim configured to work Vi compatible Look here to fix this not compatible This text assumes you work The Vim Way You might prefer to use the good old Vi way but you will have to watch out for small differences in the text then REDO If you undo too many times you can press CTRL R redo to reverse the preceding command In other words it undoes the undo To see this in action press CTRL R twice The character A and the space after it disappear young intelligent turtle There s a special version of the undo command the U undo line command The undo line command undoes all the changes made on the last line that was edited Typing this command twice cancels the preceding U A very intelligent turtle XXXX Delete very vim_doc txt A intelligent turtle XXXXXX A intelligent A very intelligent turtle A intelligent The U command is a change by itself This might be a bit confusing redoes Page 13 Delete turtle Restore line with U Undo U with u which the u command undoes and CTRL R Don t worry with u and CTRL R you can go to any of the situations you had 02 6 Other editing commands Vim has a large number of commands Here are a few often used ones APPENDING The i to change the text See Q in and below command inserts a character before the character under the cursor That works fine
344. unction Count _words range let n a firstline let count 0 while n lt a lastline let count count Wordcount getline n let n n 1 endwhile echo found count words endfunction You can call this function with 10 30call Count _words It will be executed once and echo the number of words The other way to use a line range is by defining a function without the range keyword The function will be called once for every line in the range with the cursor in that line Example function Number E echo line lane 1 Containge getlinei endfunction If you call this function with 10 15call Number The function will be called six times VARIABLE NUMBER OF ARGUMENTS Vim enables you to define functions that have a variable number of arguments The following command for instance defines a function that must have 1 argument start and can have up to 20 additional arguments function Show start The variable a 1 contains the first optional argument a 2 the second and so on The variable a 0 contains the number of extra arguments For example functionm Show letart ssil echohl Title echo Show is a start echohl None let index 1 while index lt a 0 vim_doc txt Page 185 execute echon Arg index is a index let index index 1 endwhile echo Woe endfunction This uses the echohl command to specify the highlighting used
345. ur home directory is SHOME if a gt 5 The amp name form can be used to save an option value set it to a new value do something and restore the old value Example l t save i amp ic set noic The Start delete l et amp 1c save_ic This makes sure the The Start pattern is used with the ignorecase option off Still it keeps the value that the user had set MATHEMATICS It becomes more interesting if we combine these basic items Let s start with mathematics on numbers a b add a b subtract a b multiply a b divide a b modulo The usual precedence is used Example echo 10 5 2 20 Grouping is done with braces No surprises here Example echo 10 5 2 vim_doc txt Page 178 30 Strings can be concatenated with Example Scho Eso a Sax foobar When the echo command gets multiple arguments it separates them with a space In the example the argument is a single expression thus no space is inserted Borrowed from the C language is the conditional expression a b c If a evaluates to true b is used otherwise c is used Example slet 2 2 4 secho 1 amp i is ig i is small i is small The three parts of the constructs are always evaluated first thus you could see it work as a b c 41 4 Conditionals The if commands executes the following statements until the matching endif only when a condition is met The generic for
346. usr 90 ExXE Installing Vim usr 44 txt Your own syntax highlighted usr_toc txt 45 1 Language for Messages When you start Vim it checks the environment to find out what language you are using Mostly this should work fine and you get the messages in your language if they are available To see what the current language is use this command Language If it replies with C this means the default is being used which is English Using different languages only works when Vim was compiled to handle it To find out if it works use the version command and check the output for gettext and multi_lang If they are there you are OK If you see gettext or multi_lang you will have to find another Vim What if you would like your messages in a different language There are several ways Which one you should use depends on the capabilities of your system The first way is to set the environment to the desired language before starting Vim Example for Unix env LANG de DE ISO 8859 1 vim This only works if the language is available on your system The advantage is that all the GUI messages and things in libraries will use the right language as well A disadvantage is that you must do this before starting Vim If you want to change language while Vim is running you can use the second method language fr FR ISO 8859 1 This way you can try out several names for your language You will get an error message whe
347. version A new directory will be created e g vim6l for the files of the new version Your runtime files vimre file viminfo etc will be left alone If you want to run the new version next to the old one you will have to do some handwork Don t run the install program it will overwrite a few files of the old version Execute the new binaries by specifying the full path The program should be able to automatically find the runtime files for the right version However this won t work if you set the SVIMRUNTIME variable somewhere If you are satisfied with the upgrade you can delete the files of the previous version See 90 5 90 4 Common installation issues This section describes some of the common problems that occur when installing Vim and suggests some solutions It also contains answers to many installation questions Q I Do Not Have Root Privileges How Do I Install Vim Unix Use the following configuration command to install Vim in a directory called SHOME vim configure prefix HOME This gives you a personal copy of Vim You need to put SHOME bin in your path to execute the editor Also see install home Q The Colors Are Not Right on My Screen Unix Check your terminal settings by using the following command in a shell echo TERM vim_doc txt Page 228 If the terminal type listed is not correct fix it For more hints see 06 2 Another solution is to always use the GUI version of Vim called
348. vim_doc txt USE TOC txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Mar 09 VIM USER MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Table Of Contents user manual Overview Getting Started About the manuals The first steps in Vim Moving around Making small changes Set your settings Using syntax highlighting Editing more than one file Splitting windows Using the GUI Making big changes Recovering from a crash Clever tricks usr _01 txt usr 02 EXE usr_03 txt usr_04 txt usr_05 txt usr 06 txt usr OF sXe usr_08 txt usr_09 txt usr_10 txt usr 11 txt usr 12 txt usr _ 20 txt usr _21 txt st 22 Exe usr _23 txt usr 24 txt usr 25 xt usr_26 txt USE 27 ExE usr_28 txt usr 29 txt usr_ 30 txt usr 31 EX Tuning Vim usr 40 txt usr_41 txt usr 42 txt usr 43 txt usr 44 txt usr 45 txt usr_90 txt Editing Effectively Typing command line commands quickly Go away and come back Finding the file to edit Editing other files Inserting quickly Editing formatted text Repeating Search commands and patterns Folding Moving through programs Editing programs Exploiting the GUI Make new commands Write a Vim script Add new menus Using filetypes Your own syntax highlighted Select your language Making Vim Run Installing Vim The user manual is available as a single ready to print HTML and PDF file here http vimdoc sf net Getting Started Read this from start to end to learn the essential
349. vim_doc txt Page 74 you manually select Move the cursor to the first line you want to format Start with the command gqj This formats the current line and the one below it If the first line was short words from the next line will be appended If it was too long words will be moved to the next line The cursor moves to the second line Now you can use to repeat the command Keep doing this until you are at the end of the text you want to format 10 8 Changing case You have text with section headers in lowercase You want to make the word Section all uppercase Do this with the gU operator Start with the cursor in the first column gUw section header gt SECTION header The gu operator does exactly the opposite guw SECTION header gt section header You can also use g to swap case All these are operators thus they work with any motion command with text objects and in Visual mode To make an operator work on lines you double it The delete operator is q thus to delete a line you use dd Similarly gugu makes a whole line lowercase This can be shortened to guu gUgU is shortened to gUU and g g to gys Example US a Some GIRLS have Fun E SOME girls HAVE fUN 10 9 Using an external program Vim has a very powerful set of commands it can do anything But there may still be something that an external command can do better or faster The command motion program ta
350. void that One key that can be used with mappings is the backslash Since you probably want to define more than one mapping add another character You could map p to add parens around a word and c to add curly braces for example map p i lt Esc gt ea lt Esc gt map c i lt Esc gt ea lt Esc gt You need to type the and the p quickly after another so that Vim knows they belong together The map command with no arguments lists your current mappings At least the ones for Normal mode More about mappings in section 40 1 05 4 Adding a plugin add plugin plugin Vim s functionality can be extended by adding plugins A plugin is nothing more than a Vim script file that is loaded automatically when Vim starts You can add a plugin very easily by dropping it in your plugin directory not available when Vim was compiled without the eval feature There are two types of plugins global plugin Used for all kinds of files filetype plugin Only used for a specific type of file The global plugins will be discussed first then the filetype ones add filetype plugin GLOBAL PLUGINS standard plugin When you start Vim it will automatically load a number of global plugins You don t have to do anything for this They add functionality that most people will want to use but which was implemented as a Vim script instead of being compiled into Vim You can find them listed in the help index standard plug
351. want to highlight the three items differently But condition and then might also appear in other places where they get different highlighting This is how you can do this Syntax match xIf if nextgroup xIfCondition skipwhite syntax match xIfCondition contained nextgroup xThen skipwhite Syntax match xThen then contained The nextgroup argument specifies which item can come next This is not required If none of the items that are specified are found nothing happens For example in this text if not condition then The if is matched by xIf not doesn t match the specified nextgroup xIfCondition thus only the if is highlighted The skipwhite argument tells Vim that white space spaces and tabs may appear in between the items Similar arguments are skipnl which allows a line break in between the items and skipempty which allows empty lines Notice that skipnil doesn t skip an empty line something must match after the line break 44 7 Other arguments MATCHGROUP When you define a region the entire region is highlighted according to the group name specified To highlight the text enclosed in parentheses with the group xInside for example use the following command Ssyntax region xInside start end Suppose that you want to highlight the parentheses differently You can do this with a lot of convoluted region statements or you can use the matchgroup argument This tell
352. where the next field can be entered You can move the cursor anywhere in the display also beyond the end of a line But Vim will not insert spaces there until you insert a character in that position COPYING A COLUMN You want to add a column which should be a copy of the third column and placed before the test 1 column Do this in seven steps 1 Move the cursor to the left upper corner of this column e g with test 3 2 Press CTRL V to start blockwise Visual mode 3 Move the cursor down two lines with 2j You are now in virtual space the input B line of the test 3 column 4 Move the cursor right to include the whole column in the selection plus the space that you want between the columns 91 should do it 5 Yank the selected rectangle with y 6 Move the cursor to test 1 where the new column must be placed 7 Press PpP The result should be nice table test 3 test 1 test 2 test 3 input A 0 693 0 534 0 693 input B 0913 Notice that the whole test 1 column was shifted right also the line where the test 3 column didn t have text vim_doc txt Page 124 Go back to non virtual cursor movements with set virtualedit VIRTUAL REPLACE MODE The disadvantage of using virtualedit is that it feels different You can t recognize tabs or spaces beyond the end of line when moving the cursor around Another method can be used Virtual Replace mode Suppose you have a line in a table th
353. width is set to zero to avoid automatic formatting of lines And files are always read in Unix file format Binary mode can be used to change a message in a program Be careful not to insert or delete any characters it would stop the program from working Use R to enter replace mode Many characters in the file will be unprintable To see them in Hex format set display uhex Otherwise the ga command can be used to see the value of the character under the cursor The output when the cursor is on an lt Esc gt looks like this lt gt 27 Hex ib Octal 033 There might not be many line breaks in the file To get some overview switch the wrap option off set nowrap BYTE POSITION To see on which byte you are in the file use this command g CTRL The output is verbose Col 9 16 of 9 16 Line 277 of 330 Word 1806 of 2058 Byte 10580 of 12206 The last two numbers are the byte position in the file and the total number of bytes This takes into account how fileformat changes the number of bytes that a line break uses To move to a specific byte in the file use the go command For example to move to byte 2345 2345go vim_doc txt Page 108 USING XXD A real binary editor shows the text in two ways as it is and in hex format You can do this in Vim by first converting the file with the xxd program This comes with Vim First edit the file in binary mode vim b datafile Now convert the file to a hex dump wit
354. wo c The result looks something like this file two c file one c two c one c Actually the lines in the middle will be in reverse video This is called the vertical separator It separates the two windows left and right of it There is also the vnew command to open a vertically split window on a new empty file Another way to do this vertical new The vertical command can be inserted before another command that splits a window This will cause that command to split the window vertically instead of horizontally if the command doesn t split a window it works unmodified MOVING BETWEEN WINDOWS Since you can split windows horizontally and vertically as much as you like you can create any layout of windows Then you can use these commands to move between them CTRL W h move to the window on the left CTRL W j move to the window below CTRL W k move to the window above CTRL W 1 move to the window on the right CTRL W t move to the TOP window CTRL W b move to the BOTTOM window You will notice the same letters as used for moving the cursor And the cursor keys can also be used if you like More commands to move to other windows Q wi 08 5 Moving windows You have split a few windows but now they are in the wrong place Then you need a command to move the window somewhere else For example you have three windows like this vim_doc txt Page 56 file two
355. ws command DeleteFirst ldelete Now when you execute the command DeleteFirst Vim executes ldelete which deletes the first line User defined commands must start with a capital letter You cannot use X Next and Print The underscore cannot be used You can use digits but this is discouraged To list the user defined commands execute the following command vim_doc txt Page 169 command Just like with the builtin commands the user defined commands can be abbreviated You need to type just enough to distinguish the command from another Command line completion can be used to get the full name NUMBER OF ARGUMENTS User defined commands can take a series of arguments The number of arguments must be specified by the nargs option For instance the example DeleteFirst command takes no arguments so you could have defined it as follows command nargs 0 DeleteFirst ldelete However because zero arguments is the default you do not need to add nargs 0 The other values of nargs are as follows nargs 0 No arguments nargs 1 One argument nargs Any number of arguments nargs Zero or one argument nargs One or more arguments USING THE ARGUMENTS Inside the command definition the arguments are represented by the lt args gt keyword For example command nargs Say echo lt args gt Now when you type Say Hello World Vim echoes Hello World However if you add a double quote i
356. ws contain changes Vim will to save the changes or quit to and you want to save all these vim_doc txt Page 57 wall This stands for write all But actually it only writes files with changes Vim knows it doesn t make sense to write files that were not changed And then there is the combination of qall and wall the write and quit all command wqall This writes all modified files and quits Vim Finally there is a command that quits Vim and throws away all changes gall Be careful there is no way to undo this command OPENING A WINDOW FOR ALL ARGUMENTS To make Vim open a window for each file start it with the o argument vim o one txt two txt three txt This results in file one txt one txt file two txt two txt file three txt three txt The O argument is used to get vertically split windows When Vim is already running the all command opens a window for each file in the argument list vertical all does it with vertical splits 08 7 Viewing differences with vimdiff There is a special way to start Vim which shows the differences between two files Let s take a file main c and insert a few characters in one line Write this file with the backup option set so that the backup file main c will contain the previous version of the file Type this command in a shell not in Vim vimdiff main c main c Vim will start with tw
357. xt 20 5 Command line window Typing the text in the command line works different from typing text in Insert mode It doesn t allow many commands to change the text For most commands that s OK but sometimes you have to type a complicated command That s where the command line window is useful Open the command line window with this command q Vim now opens a small window at the bottom It contains the command line history and an empty line at the end other window file txt e C e config h in set path usr include set iskeyword 48 57 192 255 set is q command line You are now in Normal mode You can use the hjkl keys to move around For example move up with 5k to the e config h in line Type h to go to the i of in and type cwout Now you have changed the line to e config h out Now press lt Enter gt and this command will be executed The command line window will close The lt Enter gt command will execute the line under the cursor It doesn t vim_doc txt matter whether Vim is in Insert mode or in Normal mode Changes in the command line window are lost They do not result in the history to be changed Except that the command you execute will be added to the end of the history like with all executed commands The command line window is very useful when you want to have overview of the history lookup a similar command change it a bit a
358. xt You can t see them it s just a position that Vim remembers To go to a mark use the command mark where mark is the mark letter Thus to move to the a mark a The command mark single quotation mark or apostrophe moves you to the beginning of the line containing the mark This differs from the mark command which moves you to marked column The marks can be very useful when working on two related parts ina file Suppose you have some text near the start of the file you need to look at while working on some text near the end of the file Move to the text at the start and place the s start mark there ms The move to the text you want to work on and put the e end mark there me Now you can move around and when you want to look at the start of the file you use this to jump there Me Then you can use to jump back to where you were or e to jump to the text you were working on at the end There is nothing special about using s for start and e for end they are just easy to remember You can use this command to get a list of marks marks You will notice a few special marks These include The cursor position before doing a jump The cursor position when last editing the file Start of the last change End of the last change Next chapter usr_04 txt Making small changes Copyright see manual copyright vim_doc txt Page usr_04 txt For Vim version 6 2 Last change 2002 Jul 18 VIM USER
359. xt just press lt Esc gt and Visual mode will stop without doing anything vim_doc txt Page 28 SELECTING LINES If you want to work on whole lines use V to start Visual mode You will see right away that the whole line is highlighted without moving around When you move left or right nothing changes When you move up or down the selection is extended whole lines at a time For example select three lines with Vjj text more text gt gt more text more text selected lines gt gt text text text Vjj gt gt text more more text more SELECTING BLOCKS If you want to work on a rectangular block of characters use CTRL V to start Visual mode This is very useful when working on tables name Q1 Q2 Q3 pierre 123 455 234 john 0 90 39 steve 392 63 334 To delete the middle Q2 column move the cursor to the Q of Q2 Press CTRL V to start blockwise Visual mode Now move the cursor three lines down with 3j and to the next word with w You can see the first character of the last column is included To exclude it use h Now press d and the middle column is gone GOING TO THE OTHER SIDE If you have selected some text in Visual mode and discover that you need to change the other end of the selection use the o command Hint o for other end The cursor will go to the other end and you can move the cursor to change where the selection starts Pressing o again brings you back to the other end
360. xt inside Vim changing it makes all non ASCII text invalid You will notice this when using registers and the viminfo file e g a remembered search pattern It s recommended to set encoding in your vimre file and leave it alone 45 4 Editing files with a different encoding Suppose you have setup Vim to use Unicode and you want to edit a file that is in 16 bit Unicode Sounds simple right Well Vim actually uses utf 8 encoding internally thus the 16 bit encoding must be converted Thus there is a difference between the character set Unicode and the encoding utf 8 or 16 bit Vim will try to detect what kind of file you are editing It uses the encoding names in the fileencodings option When using Unicode the default value is ucs bom utf 8 latinl This means that Vim checks the file to see if it s one of these encodings ucs bom File must start with a Byte Order Mark BOM This allows detection of 16 bit 32 bit and utf 8 Unicode encodings utf 8 utf 8 Unicode This is rejected when a sequence of bytes is illegal in utf 8 latinl The good old 8 bit encoding Always works When you start editing that 16 bit Unicode file and it has a BOM Vim will detect this and convert the file to utf 8 when reading it The fileencoding option without s at the end is set to the detected value In this case it is ucs 2le That means it s Unicode two bytes and little endian This file format is common on MS Windows e
361. xt will be hard to read To solve this set the background option For a dark background set background dark And for a light background set background light Make sure you put this before _ the syntax enable command otherwise the colors will already have been set You could do syntax reset after setting background to make Vim set the default colors again The colors are wrong when scrolling bottom to top Vim doesn t read the whole file to parse the text It starts parsing wherever you are viewing the file That saves a lot of time but sometimes the colors are wrong A simple fix is hitting CTRL L Or scroll back a bit and then forward again For a real fix see syn sync Some syntax files have a way to make it look further back see the help for the specific syntax file For example tex vim for the TeX syntax 06 3 Different colors syn default override If you don t like the default colors you can select another color scheme In the GUI use the Edit Color Scheme menu You can also type the command colorscheme evening evening is the name of the color scheme There are several others you might want to try out Look in the directory SVIMRUNTIME colors When you found the color scheme that you like add the colorscheme command vim_doc txt Page 44 to your vimrc file You could also write your own color scheme This is how you do it 1 Select a color scheme that comes close Copy this file t
362. y great I don t like it The gt colors are terrible What is the URL of that site YvY V Try setting textwidth to a different value e g 80 and format the text by Visually selecting it and typing gq The result is gt Did you see that site It looks really great gt I don t like it The colors are terrible What is the URL of that site You will notice that Vim did not move text from one type of comment to another The I in the second line would have fit at the end of the first line but since that line starts with gt and the second line with gt Vim knows that this is a different kind of comment A THREE PART COMMENT A C comment starts with has in the middle and at the end The entry in comments for this looks like this set comments s1 mb ex The start is defined with s1 The s indicates the start of a three piece comment The colon separates the flags from the text by which the comment is recognized There is one flag 1 This tells Vim that the middle part has an offset of one space The middle part mb starts with m which indicates it is a middle part The b flag means that a blank must follow the text Otherwise Vim would consider text like pointer also to be the middle of a comment The end part ex has the e for indentification The x flag has a special meaning It means that after Vim automatically inserted a star typing will r

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