Best of Vim Tips

http://zzapper.co.uk/vimtips.html

by henrik_w • 12 years ago

290 126 12 years ago

zzapper.co.uk

arjunrc• 12 years ago

I've been using vim for the last 2 years, and I love HN for posts like these, with all a-ha's in one page. Considerably reduces time necessary to become a vi master.

blacktulip• 12 years ago

As a VIM user I am overwhelmed by this tips webpage which, despite in small font, requires 16 page downs to reach the end. "Just use Sublime Text"[0]

[0] http://delvarworld.github.io/blog/2013/03/16/just-use-sublim...

baldfat2• 12 years ago

Can't use sublime text on servers and find Vim fits my use case better :)

BugBrother• 12 years ago

I am an Emacs guy, but even I know that vim do support ctags?!

That blog post reads like a rant, do the author really know anything?

edwintorok7• 12 years ago

I don't get it why someone would use a closed source tool to create open-source programs. Or why you'd use a closed-source tool for something as fundamental as editing a file.

akerl_2• 12 years ago

While I enjoy using open source software on principle, in practice I care way more about usability and feature set. I understand that some people make a conscious choice to only use free and/or opensource software, but it's flawed to claim closed-source software is somehow unfit to operate, especially based on the "fundamental"ness of the desired action.

sanswork2• 12 years ago

Because it doesn't matter. The closed source tool isn't going to hide stuff in your text file. And should they change completely in a way you don't like or stop updating you switch tools you aren't locked in since its a text editor.

And honestly even with open source if the main devs stop updating or doing something you don't like you're time is almost certainly better spent doing what you're doing on a different editor or the old version then taking over development on yet another text editor.

scrollaway2• 12 years ago

I completely agree that this is a garbage "tips" webpage... it's not tips, it's a bloody reference manual.

HOWEVER: The article you linked is similarly bad. There are excellent reasons to use vim outside of "keep your fingers on the home row". Very common operations such as "delete the next 30 lines", "Move these 10 lines to just after line 150" and so on are much faster in vim and this is why I use it. I don't use it for hjkl (which is only there because of the presence of arrow keys on those specific keys in the 80s) and I certainly don't use it so I can write plugins in the god-awful vimscript. Although it's nice these things are there, that is really not why I use vim.

No, I use vim because it has a comfortable set of basic keybindings, which you will use a lot while you get used to the more complex ones.

Besides, it's not so much about using vim, but about using a good GUI editor with vim mapping.

edwintorok7• 12 years ago

Vim, keybindings and composability: https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...

6cxs2hd6• 12 years ago

To be fair, the OP says it is 23 years' worth of tips. I think the intended audience is probably people already using vim for 5+ years, who are ready for this stuff?

(As for "just use Sublime", I'd say just use Emacs :P -- but seriously both are probably OT for this.)

smoothgrips• 12 years ago

I program in both Windows and Linux environments, Visual Studio for the former and Vim for the latter. When I transition from Windows to Linux (and thus VS to Vim), I realize how much more I enjoy Vim. Even with VS's fancy intellisense and other similar features, I'm still faster in Vim. And every time I learn a new trick, I like Vim even more. And I've only been using Vim for a few years. I wonder how much faster and better I'll be after five more years of using it.

lucianp• 12 years ago

You should give a try to VsVim [1], a plugin for Visual Studio that provides Vim emulation. It supports a lot of features [2] and settings [3] and, most importantly, it is Open Source (it is also written in F#, which is nice).

It's always the first plugin I install in Visual Studio, I cannot work without it. It might not suit the needs of more advanced Vim users, though.

[1]. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-...

[2]. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/Supported-Features

[3]. https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim/wiki/Settings-Reference

doorhammer8• 12 years ago

I used VIM as my only editor for something like four years, but I've got a full time .net/C# job now.

I can still use vim shortcuts comfortably and such, but setting up the environment was always a pain for me.

I was setting up an editing environment on a linux VM at home to write some Haskell, and started looking through vim plugins, etc. I got sick of it after five minutes because I didn't really want it to be a big thing, so I installed ST2 and the various haskell plugins. It took about ten minutes to get it running in a state where I could compile/build/repl from the text editor and have basic vim motions (which is really all I need from it right now). It also has a few things I really dig like the fuzzy command palette and multiple cursors (which are now available in a lot of editors, but ST2 still has the cleanest implementation that I've used so far).

I think the package manager/extensible side of vim is what really bugs me. Sure I can get in and figure it out, but I just don't want to most of the time.

Obviously this is a really superficial look at what vim has to offer and a very narrow use-case/problem; ymmv dramatically. I contributed a pretty solid chunk of change to the neovim project and I'm really a big fan of vim in general, but for that specific use case, I wasn't terribly happy.

falcolas• 12 years ago

setting up the environment was always a pain for me.

I have never understood this argument. Copying my local .vimrc and .vim from one machine to another has always been enough to create an _exact duplicate_ of my environment. What's missing?

jdonaldson• 12 years ago

"Just use Textmate" or "Just use <Propietary Editor>" doesn't hold much water.

Vim is a hot mess in some regards, especially the scripting and plugin system. However, it's available virtually everywhere. I'm holding out hope that modern versions like neovim will address some of the legacy issues.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim

Grue3• 12 years ago

Another Emacs user here. The article is bullshit. If you use Sublime Text now, in a few years you will be using another editor (Atom?) and so on, or you'll become a dinosaur stuck with an outdated OS just because you need your favorite editor (similar to how some people still cling to WordPerfect running on DOS). On the other hand, Emacs and Vim are eternal: once you learn them, you're set for life, and you'll only get better at using them as the time goes on.

mrab• 12 years ago

That article reads like it was written by a fifth grader describing reasons why dodgeball is better than soccer.

buster2• 12 years ago

Sort of let's me wonder, why anybody would want to learn all those. I use vim regularly, but to be honest, for 90% of tasks i would be just as efficient with pico or mcedit.

I guess i am using vim only because it is most often available on 3rd party systems and because of the occasional need for those last 10%.

And to be honest, i used to use vim on the desktop for some time, but now we have this variety of options.. from fast loading textadept, gedit, sublime text3 to full-blown IntelliJ.. Why vim? Because it's "cool"? Feels more like ancient and antiquated.

Nice list though, it's bookmarked for those 10%! :)

4k• 12 years ago

Hardly anybody would want to learn all of the features ofcourse. There are advantages of using vim which other editors can't compete with (imho):

- A just booted VM with with no window manager installed. You have very few choices, but can always count on vi being there.

- Abstraction: One builds up the knowledge of different things over a period of time. For exaxmple, once you learn 'w' is next word, it can be combined with the new knowledge of 'd' for delete quite intuitively. Not saying other editors don't have that.

- Each popular editor I know of has a VI mode built in (or easily available). So, being comfortable with vi means being able to use any of the mainstream editors with vi mode, but not the other way around.

zecho• 12 years ago

It's useful to see how others apply vim's grammar in interesting ways. To me, it's like seeing a new design pattern. Not necessarily immediately useful, but a maybe a new way to think about something I may not already know.

buster2• 12 years ago

I didn't question the usefulness, i still often use vim and i am regularly amazed by it. But still.

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

That's the way I approach some lists like this one. Specific examples can help one to in turn better learn and generalize certain abilities/behaviours.

I'll also add: So, one person puts up a long-ish page of examples. Is there anything inherently wrong with this? Presumably, it's useful to them and perhaps to some others. Doesn't that suffice -- it's the Internet!

Not every page needs to be carefully curated for global karma-whoring.

snarfy• 12 years ago

If you use Vim with C#, you should check out the Omnisharp plugin:

https://github.com/nosami/Omnisharp

It provides intellisense, find-usages, and other features.

mikewhy• 12 years ago

Also YouCompleteMe[0], which uses Omnisharp for C# and Jedi for Python. It has recently been refactored into a standalone server that talks to the editor plugin, so we may see this in other editors.

[0] https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe

Yuioup• 12 years ago

No official Windows support :-(

hpvic03• 12 years ago

Though I always like to learn more about Vim, there are way too many commands in this list to call it a "Best of", and it seems that many of them are not actually that useful.

jaredmcateer2• 12 years ago

Don't let this list intimidate you, Vim allows you to learn at your own pace, I was mashing h,j,k, and l for years before I learned the beauty of grouping movements (e.g., 12j instead of j 12 times). I try to learn one new thing a week so I can commit it to muscle memory.

bfwi2• 12 years ago

Hah, I didn't think of that! Just before reading this comment I was working along in the editor, furiously pressing j/k. I'll put this to use immediately.

zachrose• 12 years ago

It seems like so much of power vim use is about jumping 3 characters ahead or 12 lines down.

Is this for real? Do you count the number of lines or characters before you move? Do you look at line numbers and do the arithmetic in your head? This can't be right, right?

base698• 12 years ago

Yeah, it seems like it promotes learning by rote vs learning how it actually works.

Grok vim!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

pcsanwald• 12 years ago

I love pages like this because this is how the internet used to be. weirder.

5h2• 12 years ago

s/used/should/

It's nice to not "read more after the jump" or "below the fold", no over-pagination, no 100% width 400px deep semi-relevant banner image, no pull quotes in 30px ultra-bold fonts floated over to the sides, no "you may also be interested in" and no asinine comments, .. oh, wait!

w0ts0n• 12 years ago

I disagree. This is way to much information for me to digest. I think a happy medium is nice. Enough information on the screen to get the point across but not too little that I have to click everything to find out what I need.

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

s/used/used to/

eob• 12 years ago

What do you mean by weird? The extremely high content-to-style ratio compared to a lot of pages today?

albemuth• 12 years ago

I don't know, if this were a "Top 10 vim tips, number 6 blew my mind" style article I feel I'd engage with it more. Also, show only one tip at a time with pagination so I can learn one thing at a time.

mariodiana• 12 years ago

I don't know what the other guy means by weird, but I mean the extremely high your-brain-has-to-operate-like-a-combined-parser-and-compiler to make any sense of that kind of thing. You're telling me you're not dulled into a stupor by trying to read that?

robert_nsu• 12 years ago

Wouldn't you like to know how to do all of this in five easy steps? /s

dodo53• 12 years ago

...That Emacs Users Don't Want You To Know!

null_ptr• 12 years ago

If you click on "Tips Home" it gets even weirder. Like the url for "Technical tips" being "make-money-online-tips/", and check the Blogroll.

bfwi2• 12 years ago

I really like vim and use it every day, but I'm honestly never going to commit all this to memory.

thegeomaster• 12 years ago

I think you are very much wrong!

I started using vim only recently, and when I was running through vimtutor, I was telling myself how I'd never be able to remember or understand what is w, W, B, E, {, dib, ci(, ma{{{yy`a"bddp (maybe there's a better one than this) or :%s/a/b/g.

After only a month or so of usage, I've come to use commands and sequences like this by heart. And when I read useful tips or watch screencasts, I'm just remembered how I've barely even scratched the surface of productivity with vim.

That's why I don't fear I won't be able to remember more and more new, complex commands. I think it will all come naturally, like the first ones I learned. The same should happen not only with me, but with you or anyone else who is dreadful of remembering increasingly complex workflows of commands with vim.

beachstartup• 12 years ago

in unix, you memorize by doing, not by studying

saganus• 12 years ago

I would actually venture to say that it does not apply only to Unix but for life itself, no?

geekingfrog• 12 years ago

One very useful advice when it comes to 'what to memorize' is trying to always watch yourself using vim. If you happen to do something repetitive, ask yourself: is there a better way to do it? How to automate it? And then, commit this new tip to memory. This way, you actually only memorize what is directly useful. This tip has served me very well.

drikerf• 12 years ago

For me, just using NERDTree and ctrl-p combined with basic skills from the tutorial made me love vim :)

cies2• 12 years ago

Let me add one Vim tip that recently got me:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Seriously, to me it solved all my issues with Vim. Now I have several processes attached to my "Evil", heaps of plugins installed, yet everything blazing fast. And the configuring in elisp started as a little awkward, but now it feels so much more sensible then vim-script (especially knowing that development on Emacs started ding the 70s).

With Evil I can say that --for me-- the Vim/Emacs fight is over:

Emacs now has a great editor...

...and Vim a proper "operating system".

laichzeit03• 12 years ago

Evil still lacks q: and q/ for command and search history editing. Really pains me that they haven't implemented this yet. There's also nothing that 100% replaces the CtrlP plugin for Vim on Emacs.

leorocky• 12 years ago

Yeah setting up fuzzy finding on emacs is a huge pain. It's not a hard problem to solve, so maybe if I end up making more use of evil I'll try and write something although elisp is not fun. I currently use helm, ido and projectile and it only kind of works as good as cntrlP or command+T on textmate or sublime text.

laichzeit03• 12 years ago

Please vote up the features you think Evil might be lacking, or better yet, contribute to the development effort :)

https://bitbucket.org/lyro/evil/issues?kind=enhancement&sort...

dasil0032• 12 years ago

And people complain about UI discoverability in vim, but the fact is if you know how to quit out of vim you will sooner or later bump into the command history; if you experience rogue-like joy in the at this moment you know vim was meant for you.

nilkn• 12 years ago

I've been thinking about trying this out for a while now. I just haven't mustered the courage to make the jump. It would be great if there was a tutorial focused specifically on helping vim users who know basically nothing about emacs make the jump.

With that said, is it really worth it if I already use vim along with tmux? This is probably what has kept me from trying out emacs before. Vim isn't an IDE, but with appropriate use of tmux it feels like it can be one.

aerique• 12 years ago

It's hard to say whether it is worth it. Is there anything you're missing from Vim + Tmux?

The best thing would be to just check it out if you're ever in a playful mood but the chance is pretty big that just playing around with Emacs for an hour will not be enough to convince you to switch.

Feel free to mail me about Emacs so I can help you as Vim user on the way and if you keep notes you can write that "Emacs for Vim users" guide that you asked for.

vsbuffalo• 12 years ago

I was a long time emacs user, and switched to Vim due to typing pain. Even with Evil, I can't see moving back. Vim + Tmux + YouCompleteMe > Emacs. There's just no comparison. No Emacs shell will ever be as good as zsh, and there's always some latency for some reason when using shells running in emacs. And, there's no youcompleteme.

andrey-p2• 12 years ago

Some useful tricks in there.

Also, this:

  ggVGg?                          : rot13 whole file (toggles)

So g?<motion> applies ROT13 to text. But... why?

Edit: Make that "a couple of useful tricks in there". These are the ones I can actually see myself using:

  @@     last recording
  @:     last command-mode command

skymt• 12 years ago

At a guess: the old-fashioned Unix way of composing mail and Usenet messages is to have your client call your editor. Rot13 was (is?) common in Usenet discussions of fiction to avoid posting spoilers where anyone can accidentally read them. It's not something you would use when editing source code.

dllthomas6• 12 years ago

"old-fashioned Unix way of composing mail and Usenet messages is to have your client call your editor"

Some of us still do that. I <3 nmh.

andrey-p2• 12 years ago

You know when you read someone's comment and then your immediate thought is "I'm way too old to appreciate this"? I read your comment and thought the exact reverse. I'm way too young to appreciate this.

Thanks for the insight!

voltagex_4• 12 years ago

I wish Reddit would implement that.

dllthomas6• 12 years ago

Are you asking the mechanism? It's because ? is defined as an action to rot13 the selected text.

Are you asking the motivation? I presume it's because someone wanted to be able to easily obscure things like spoilers in messages to mailing lists.

As a mnemonic, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Fishkins• 12 years ago

Just a nitpick, but applying a command to the whole file can be done faster with ggg?G That also has the benefit of working with plain vi, since vi doesn't support visual mode. I didn't know about the rot13 command. I probably won't ever use it, but I think it's fun that it exists.

saosebastiao• 12 years ago

I can't wait for neovim. The promise of a better scripting language, better remote editing experience, better native GUI support on non-linux platforms, and better IDE integration has me itching to try it out.

bla2• 12 years ago

Vim has seen active development for over 20 years and is available almost anywhere due to this. Reimplementations are announced every now and then but usually fizzle out after a few years. We'll see how long neovim stays around.

(And the MacVim native Mac UI is pretty nice imho.)

doorhammer8• 12 years ago

I'm really stoked about neovim. I hadn't really thought about it, but it'd be interesting to really go through all the substantial efforts to fork/clone/refactor vim and compare/contrast their primary goals and vision with neovim.

Might be fun to do some light reading on it tonight

afarrell2• 12 years ago

Every few days I see something that reminds me I really need to learn how to start contributing to neovim (probably by writing tests in lua). I really can't wait until it is ready to use and I can try writing a plugin.

voltagex_4• 12 years ago

I just pester people on the issue tracker - https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/696

I haven't been told to STFU and I get to keep a close eye on progress so it's a benefit for me.

It's worth at least trying to build it on your platform to try and iron out the CMake weirdness.

gnur• 12 years ago

I was really excited as well, until they decided to remove the encryption completely.

The nice thing about the encryption in vim was that it was a cross platform way for encrypting and decrypting plain text. I use it nearly everyday on my (work) windows pc, headless ubuntu server, macbook pro and nexus 5. And the only thing I have to do is open the file with vim.

dasil0032• 12 years ago

That's a bummer for you, but does it really kill it completely? The way they are going it seems like they are making significant tradeoffs to remove legacy code in order to support modern features on modern systems. This should make it possible to be a true competitor in the GUI space to Sublime, but at the cost of ubiquity. I expect vim will continue to live on in most Linux distributions for the foreseeable future, even if neovim gets major traction amongst developers.

And personally I am fine using neovim on my dev box, and firing up vim on the server. Is that a non-starter for you? Do you really need automatic encryption on all your daily editing tasks on your dev machine? And if so, why are you not using full disk encryption?

stonemetal• 12 years ago

:'a,'bg/fred/s/dick/joe/igc : VERY USEFUL

Wow, thanks for the tip, any ideas on what it does?

A lot of these seem to be learn to use regular expressions and not really vim related other than vim supports regular expressions. I.E. the 4 or 5 different ways to find an exactly 4 digit number that mostly seem to boil down to '/' does search by regular expressions and here is a regular expression that finds 4 digit numbers.

achal• 12 years ago

'a,'b

Between mark `a' and `b'

g/fred

If the line contains the pattern Fred, execute the following command (s/dick/joe/igc)

s/dick/joe/

Replace dick with joe

/igc

i: Case insensitive

g: Replace multiple occurrences on the same line

c: Ask for confirmation on each substitution

I may be wrong about some detail, but I believe that's it.

wunderlust• 12 years ago

I hope I never have to use (most of) those.

dave1010uk• 12 years ago

I love Vim but never use it. 99% of the time I'm editing code in an IDE that knows about the language semanticly and knows how to refactor (extract/move/rename) code. It would be incredible if Vim/Neovim had a plugin that could do the same refactorings as IntelliJ.

At the moment the ease and frictionlessness of refactoring like this (instead of manually moving text objects around) beats Vim's productivity gains. It's a shame because I still often think in terms like "ci(" when using an IDE.

I've tried Vim emulators in IDEs (not recently, mind) but they're not the same.

Anyone have any suggestions to get the best of both worlds?

danielbarla• 12 years ago

I'm a relatively happy user of Vim emulators in IDEs (mostly in VS / IntelliJ / Eclipse); e.g. I might do a cw / ciw / ct[first letter of next word in variable name] and then hit the IDE's shortcut for rename refactoring. Simple macros for tedious repetitive tasks. For this, I find emulators sufficient, a kind of "best of both worlds".

I suspect my usage of Vim itself is fairly basic, making this workable. What issues did you find with this approach?

daniel-levin• 12 years ago

These sort of tips are only useful in highly specific cases. It's probably not worth learning them off by heart because of how infrequently you'll end up using them. BUT, understanding how the author(s) came up with these is incredibly powerful. The combinatorial explosion of the composition of Vim features means that it's practically impossible to learn all of the commands.

That said, it's really beneficial to learn how to form these commands yourself. For instance, if you know regexes, a good chunk of the commands presented would be relatively easy to come up with yourself. Is it worth learning regexes, Vim shortcuts (basically a lot of arcane things)? Maybe, maybe not. If you spend (or plan on spending) a huge amount of time manipulating text files it's probably worthwhile. For me at least, it's much more satisfying to do most text manipulations (e.g. remove trailing whitespace) by running a concise command, than doing it manually.

For what it's worth, it's even fun to sit and think of how you can avoid doing some manual task. Vim shortcuts + regexes are a really good way of avoiding silly work.

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