Advanced vim tips and tricks

http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/help/vim/

by bnmrrs • 17 years ago

21 10 17 years ago

cs.swarthmore.edu

yangyang3• 17 years ago

Not really "advanced": most of this is pretty basic - includes cursor movement, searching as well as some more interesting stuff.

babo• 17 years ago

Basic or not, this is a fine collection of VIM patterns. While vim help is OK but far from usable, it's just too long to read without a proper formatting. This site is just the opposite, short and easy to navigate tips, quite handy as a reference.

yangyang3• 17 years ago

Don't get me wrong - it's not a bad collection. I'm just commenting on the HN headline.

mattyb• 17 years ago

This misses out on lots of stuff. Two weeks ago, I set aside an entire day and read a bunch of Vim tutorials. My cheat sheet filled up 2 8.5"x11" pages. Here are a few gems:

gg -> go to the top of the file.

G -> go to the bottom.

:set splitright -> makes :vs open the file on the right

:set splitbottom -> makes :sp open on the bottom

Ctrl-w cycles through split windows. Ctrl-[h,j,k,l] goes to the window in that direction [left, down, up, right].

When either :vs or :sp are invoked without filenames, they open the current buffer. Very useful for looking at 2 sections of the same file at once.

:tabe [file] -> how could this get forgotten? Opens the file in a new tab.

:set number -> shows line numbers.

[Line#]G -> jumps to that line.

O -> capital oh, inserts a blank line above the current line and goes into insert mode. Perfect for comments.

:set ic -> ignores case for searching, usually useful. :set noic makes searching case sensitive again. (:set no[setting] turns that setting off)

:set lbr -> visual word wrap.

Text objects are also damn cool. In visual mode (v):

i" -> selects the contents of quotes.

i( -> select the contents of parens.

i[ -> selects the contents of square brackets.

i{ -> selects the contents of curly brackets.

Using a instead of i for the above commands selects the delimiter also.

>> -> indents. << does the opposite.

% -> goes to matching paren/bracket. Great for debugging.

* -> go to next instance of current word. # to go to previous instance. Good for cycling through function definitions.

Edit: formatting, more commands.

chancho• 17 years ago

Putting \c and \C in the search pattern can also be used to turn case sensitivity off or on, respectively, for just that pattern.

mbenjaminsmith• 17 years ago

I love vim. That's all I have to share.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

The OSS book, Vim Recipes is really great as well, and if you know something that isn't on there just fork it and push it yourself.

Here's another one a Byte of Vim, also free on a CC license, but not as good as the Vim Recipes I've found.

mace• 17 years ago

Vim Recipes: http://vim.runpaint.org/toc/

A Byte of Vim: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim

This cheatsheet has worked really well for me: http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif

yangyang3• 17 years ago

Vim's :help is extensive. Try :help quickref.

vimtutor is good for getting started too.

321abc• 17 years ago

Some other great vim resources:

Vim tips wiki: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The best collection of vim scripts: http://www.vim.org

#vim on freenode

Advanced vim tips and tricks

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