Vim

Vim is the humankind’s tool to fight ignorance, poverty, and alien invasion by writing and editing structured text.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Klutzy who enlightened me to this path of Vim madness mastery.

Random facts

As if to prove how profound the editor is, there are facts that shock even seasoned Vim users. I tried to list the most useful and less known ones below.

• Insert mode indentation: In insert mode, you don’t need to escape to normal mode to change indentation. Press Ctrl-D and Ctrl-T.
• Edit Vim commands with Vim: In command mode, press Ctrl-F to enter command editing. Use all Vim features like hjkl, ^$, wb, ydp and ia to edit the command and press enter to execute. This works with searches too.
• Paste in insert mode: Sometimes you want this because escaping to normal mode and pasting will have a different result (for example, the newline autoindent will be lost.) Ctrl-R and ".
  • Quick calculator: in insert mode, press Ctrl-R and =. The cursor will be at the bottom of the screen, at which you can type basic mathematical expression like “144*63/4.”
• Vim session: Save the current splits and tabs with :mksession mysession.vim. Restore the session with vim -S mysession.vim. Of course you can automate this.
• Spell checking: You’ll be surprised how handy it is when you enable it for text file types. autocmd FileType md,txt setlocal spell
  • ]s and [s to jump to the nearest misspelling.
• Unlike j and k which move the cursor based on the actual lines separated by newlines, gj and gk move the cursor based on the screen representation.
• A is a synonym for $a. I for ^i.
• Some people don’t know what o and O do.
• ^ sends the cursor to the beginning of the line except the indenting spaces. How do you go to the beginning of the line including the indenting spaces? 0.
• It is well known that * searches for the word under the cursor, but many people are not aware that # does it to the opposite direction. (The same relationship for / and ?.)
• Sort all lines and remove duplicates: sort u
• :g/pattern/d deletes all lines that include the pattern. :v/pattern/d deletes all lines that does not include the pattern.

Plugins

Vimscript is known to terrify developers, but smart people somehow figured out and extended Vim to support incredible features.

The first thing to get is a plugin manager. The plugin manager position of Vim went through a Warring States period including pathogen, Vundle, and neobundle, but it seems I’ve found the resolution: junegunn’s vim-plug. It is lightweight, configurable, and lightning fast due to:

• Concurrent download/installation of multiple plugins
• git clone --depth=1 by default to minimize unnecessary network overhead and waste of disk space

The plugins I have deployed are:

• christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator: If you already use Vim, start using Tmux today and join the Text Triumvirate. Vim Tmux Navigator is a necessary plugin for using Vim with Tmux.
• airblade/vim-gitgutter: Clever and unobtrusive solution to see which line of the file is added, removed, or modified.
• bling/vim-airline: Powerline-style status bar that is much more useful than the default bottom line.
• junegunn/rainbow_parentheses.vim: Show corresponding parentheses with colors.
• kshenoy/vim-signature: Marks are a traveler’s best friend. Make them more usable.

Tim Pope: The Vim Pope

tpope deserves a separate section. This person is amazing. He has “a perverse knowledge of Vim script so vast that many would consider it a symptom of mental illness.” Check out how he advertises his dispatch.vim (sound required). He authored a bewildering number of Vim plugins, most of which rock.

Noteworthy ones include:

• vinegar.vim: The best way to navigate through files in Vim.
• commentary.vim: The best way to manage comments in Vim.
• surround.vim: Change 'lorem ipsum' to "lorem ipsum" with five keystrokes.
• repeat.vim: Fantastic complement to surround.vim as well as many other plugins. Surround strong with ysiW' and you have 'strong'. Then press . twice for '''strong''' which is MediaWiki syntax.
• eunuch.vim: Move, delete, and chmod the file you’re editing.
• abolish.vim: I can’t summarize this one. I recommend you go read the explanation yourself, because it’s fun.

The .vimrc

The .vimrc file is to a Vim user as a lightsaber is to a Jedi. Some good starting points:

• Installing sensible.vim
• Reading Doug Black’s A Good Vimrc
• Reading Vincent Driessen’s How I boosted my Vim
• If you are more of a writer than a coder, Vim Setup for Markdown may help.
• Check out this insane and awesome idea: eigenvimrc

Tips below are what I have set up, all of which I can highly recommend.

Recycling Ctrl-S

Ctrl-S freezes the terminal. Ctrl-Q resurrects it. It is hard to understand why such feature even exists at all. Turns out it’s a legacy of teletype. You can disable it in your shell configuration (~/.bashrc by default)

stty stop undef

and you should. After that this extra seat on the keyboard can be wired to a useful feature.

Saving the file is :w, but this is too much endeavor. ⇧ Shift, ;, w, and Enter: four keystrokes. If you are in the insert mode, that’s five.

Ctrl-S, with only two keystrokes, is actually an excellent mnemonic for this because it stands for “Save” and means exactly that in many other editors.

" Map Ctrl-S to saving in both normal and insert mode
nnoremap <C-s> :w<CR>
inoremap <C-s> <ESC>:w<CR>

Recycle complete! With only one line in .bashrc and two lines in .vimrc. Press Ctrl-S anytime (both in normal mode and in insert mode) to save the file. You won’t believe how convenient it is once you get used to it.

Post-save hook

It is common to have a task that needs to be run every time a file is saved. Linting source code, converting Markdown document to HTML, etc. Assuming such task is a command named build all:

:command! Build
    \ execute ':w'
    \ | execute ':silent !build all'
    \ | execute ':redraw!'

" Map Ctrl-S to the command in both normal and insert mode
nnoremap <C-s> :Build<CR>
inoremap <C-s> <ESC>:Build<CR>

If you want to enable this configuration only for certain file types, use

autocmd FileType yourtype,anothertype nnoremap <C-s> :Build<CR>
autocmd FileType yourtype,anothertype inoremap <C-s> <ESC>:Build<CR>

and change the yourtype,anothertype part to the correct file type. For example, markdown.

This saves you so many keystrokes AND mental process. Note that if the build all command takes long, fails often, and prints out something meaningful, dispatch.vim suits better.

Obviously the feature doesn’t have to be bound to Ctrl-S. If you prefer to have separate keys for saving files and running the command, I suggest F5 for the latter.

autocmd FileType yourtype,anothertype nnoremap <F5> :Build<CR>
autocmd FileType yourtype,anothertype inoremap <F5> <ESC>:Build<CR>

Restore the last editing position

" Restore the last editing position
au BufReadPost *
\ if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") <= line("$") |
\ exe "norm g`\"" |
\ endif

Afterthought sudo

If you forget to open a file with sudo vim instead of vim and make changes, the result is frustrating.

$ vim /etc/hosts
...

:w
E45: 'readonly' option is set (add ! to override)
:w!
"/etc/hosts" E212: Can't open file for writing
what the !@#$%^&*

Open .vimrc and include the following:

" :w!! to save with sudo
cmap w!! %!sudo tee > /dev/null %

You can now

$ vim /etc/hosts
...

:w
E45: 'readonly' option is set (add ! to override)
:w!
"/etc/hosts" E212: Can't open file for writing
:w!!
[sudo] password for alice:

Hence the saying:

Violence Exclamation mark: If does not solve your problem, you are not using enough of it.

Delete without copy

Deleting pollutes the register by default. "_d is not quite memorable or easy to type. A brilliant solution by Hyeon Kim and Klutzy:

" Press backspace in visual mode to delete without copy
vnoremap <backspace> "_d

Backspace! Never realized this key was being wasted. “Backspace deletes without copy” makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

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