Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing Bram Moolenaar November 2000 If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes. The open source text editor Vim (Vi IMproved) will be used here to present the ideas about effective editing, but they apply to other editors just as well. Part 1: edit a file 1. Most time is spent reading, checking for errors and looking for the right place to work on, rather than inserting new text or changing it. Quite often you will want to search for some text you know is there. If you see a specific word and want to search for other occurrences of the same word, use the * command. In structured text there are even more possibilities to move around quickly. Use % to jump from an open brace to its matching closing brace. There are many more, of course. There are three basic steps: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Epilogue
Easy note taking in Vim peterodding.com / code / vim / notes Ohloh: Mostly written in Vim Script, 2411 lines of code, 5 contributors in last 12 monthsGitHub: Watched by 201 people, most recent update was 8 months agoVim Online: Rated 358, downloaded 4839 times The vim-notes plug-in for the Vim text editor makes it easy to manage your notes in Vim: # Install & usage Please note that the vim-notes plug-in requires my vim-misc plug-in which is separately distributed. Unzip the most recent ZIP archives of the vim-notes and vim-misc plug-ins inside your Vim profile directory (usually this is ~/.vim on UNIX and %USERPROFILE%\vimfiles on Windows), restart Vim and execute the command :helptags ~/.vim/doc (use :helptags ~\vimfiles\doc instead on Windows). If you prefer you can also use Pathogen, Vundle or a similar tool to install & update the vim-notes and vim-misc plug-ins using a local clone of the git repository. # Options :let g:notes_directories = ['~/Documents/Notes', '~/Dropbox/Shared Notes'] # Backwards compatibility
Vim Regular Expressions 101