Vim: hate it then love it

Nov 2012 - 3 min read

So I’ve been using vim every day for about 6 months now. It was an exercise in frustration for most of that time, until it became second nature; so much so that I then found other editors and word-processors less effective to use as I’d keep trying vim commands…

Starting to use vim is easy with vimtutor, which is simply a clever text file that you learn to manipulate with vim. Here are a few tips:

Use tabs. :tabf followed by a file name will open a file in a new tab — with tab completion. :tabnew is self explanatory. gt selects the next tab, gT the previous
Use Buffers. This allows you to split a window to view another part of the file for reference. CTRL+w, w followed by s splits horizontally, v vertically. q will close the window. To open a new file in a buffer, :sp. You may switch windows with CTRL+w, w. opens a split buffer vertically.
CTRL+a and CTRL+x increment and decrement a (decimal) number under the cursor. Precede it with a number to repeat the operation
Use –VISUAL BLOCK– mode (CTRL+v) combined with I to prepend something to several lines at once. It will take effect when you go back to normal mode. You can also search and replace in the block in any visual mode!
cc blanks the line and puts you into insert mode
O and o creates a newline above and below the current line respectively
ddp swaps the current line with the next
ci followed by a delimiter will change text within that delimiter. For example, ci" will change beans in "beans"
cw will change the current word
vim -p will open a set of files in tabs. -o will open in a split buffer, and -O will do the same, but vertically
When on the command line, Ctrl+f will allow you to edit the command line vi-style. Ctrl+C will exit this mode.
Ctrl+[ may be better than ESC as you don’t have the leave the home keys
add set -o vi to your bashrc for (default insert-mode) readline editing!
J will join the next line on the end of the current line
vi{ to visual mode select in {} parenthesis. Then zf to fold that section.
gv to select the last selection
gq to justify the current paragraph

I recommend you customise vim; I tried getting used to the stock configuration on Ubuntu, but it was too minimal and there were far too many annoyances. Remove the irritating things, add features such as the solarized colour scheme; a well-engineered palette for anything you stare at. Pathogen is worth installing to make managing plugins easier.

I made a vimrc shared between my computers, and eventually got carried away and made a dotfiles git repository with configuration files for bash, tmux and git.

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