vim

Initial Setup

I got into vim from a co-worker. I thought it’s that clunky text editor in your terminal you must use when you have ssh into the linux server. However, I’ve grown to understand vim is much more than a text editor. It can also be an IDE.

When I first used vim, it just looked plain an boring. The black screen with hard to understand shortcuts. There weren’t any line numbers. I didn’t even know how to exit the damn program for a good 5 minutes.

Then I started figuring it out slowly. Vim has different modes. Vim can do macros. Vim can find things with the same grep commands. And it’s quite expandable with the limitless plugins. Vim is an endless rabbithole where you will get sucked in hours just setting it up. But it’s your customization. And that’s the beauty of vim.

Best advice - configure vim, and for that matter dotfiles, on your own. Don’t blindly copy and paste configurations, because you’ll never understand them all.

Modal Editing

Quoted from Nick Nisi

Change the meaning of the keys in each mode of operation

• Normal mode - navigate the structure of the file
• Insert Mode - editing the file
• Visual mode - highlighting portions of the file to manipulate at once
• Ex mode - command mode

Line Numbers

Where are my line numbers? Simply type the following.

:set number

To remove the numbers, you can use this command.

:set nonumber

Configuration

If you’re sick and tired of setting everything up every time you boot up vim, simply place the configuration in your configuration file. You can find the configuration file at this location. ~/.vimrc

Here’s a truncated version of my general settings.

syntax enable     " Enable syntax highlighting
set tabstop=2     " set the tab stop at 2 spaces
set shiftwidth=2  " set the shift width by 2 spaces
set noexpandtab   " do not expand tab
set number        " show line numbers

For all of my settings, please view my dotfiles.

Useful Shortcuts

All of the shortcuts can be found on the Vim Wiki Website

Navigation

• h for left
• l for right
• j for down
• k for up
• gg top of the file
• H top of the window
• ctrl + e move window down one line
• ctrl + y move window up one line

Word Manipulation

• w to go forward to the beginning of next word
• b to go backward to the beginning of previous word
• e to go forward to the end of the next word
• dw delete word up to the cursor including space between next word
• diw delete word on cursor

Yanking Words

• yiw yank in word

Line Manipulation

• 0 or ^ for beginning of line
• shift + i go to the beginning of line and insert
• $ go to end of line
• shift + a go to end of line and insert
• dd for delete line where cursor is on

Moving lines

• :m <line number> move to after the line number
• [selected_line_num]m <line_number> moves the line to after the line number
• [from_line_num,to_line_num]m <line_number> moves the selected lines to after the line number

Vim as a Language

Operations and thing you want to do the operation to. :

Editing

• u for undo

Many times, you’ll want to know how to copy and paste.

• TODO https://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_clipboard_sharing

Colon Commands

• :help <command> for help on any command

Plugins

Vim, like other text editors, has an ecosystem of plugins.

• vundle - plugin manager
• nerdtree - file tree
• ctrlp - Fuzzy file finder
• fugitive - git tool
• syntastic - syntax checker/linter
• vim-markdown - markdown syntax, matching rules and mappings, and extensions

Packages

• Sparkup - For html tag completion

Colorize

I’m currently using Monokai, mainly because it was a default I had with Ruby on sublime. I set it up using vim-monokai, which I actually want to go back and figure out how to hook it up with vundle and have it linked to the repo.

I want to figure out how to do this better, so I placed a todo with the wiki from the vim wikia.

• Todo: https://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Turn_on_syntax_coloring_in_Mac_OS_X
• Todo: talk about colorschemes package

You can change the color scheme within normal mode. Heres how.

:colorscheme <name>
" short version
:colo <name>
" autocomplete
:colo <press tab>

Macros

Repeat last change

. command repeats the last change made in normal mode. It’s like oh my gosh amaze balls.

• TODO https://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change
• TODO Show an example

Recording

q{register} (do the things) q

Registers

WIP

More Research to go through

• https://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Vim-as-IDE/
• coloring vim (as stated above)
• adding more language support
• adding line numbers
• go to top of file (shortcut)
• go to bottom of file (shortcut)
• how to find
• Macros: q command, recording so you don’t repeat yourself
• Surround.vim
• mapping escape key to caps lock
• relative numbering
• commenting
• copying and pasting that doesn’t get ruined with crazy indents
• Snippets

Helpful Resources

• vim + tmux - Talk at OMG!Code given by Nick Nisi

• vimtutor - type vimtutor in your terminal. Quick lessons summaries can be found on this post.