Viiim Tips

" + g p

or

" + g P

Good link for explaining the differences in setting up your vimrc for Linux/Mac/Windows.

I keep forgetting how to search and replace in vim so I decided to just create quick "sticky note" post.

:%s/search/replace/g -- replaces the word "search" for "replace", and the g stands for global.

:%s/search/replace/gc -- same as above but it asks for confirmation at each search/replace.

Often you have hash keys in strings that you may need to copy many times. This can be cumbersome but thanks to vim, it's actually a fairly....efficient (correct diction?) process. Put your cursor anywhere on the string that represents the hash key and press ci' (notice the single quote at the end).

I think it's just my personal .vimrc settings but whenever I search for something in Vim, every occurrence o that word gets highlighted.

This is useful when I'm looking for something but after I've found it, I don't want the highlighting anymore. I then use the command ":noh" for no highlighting.

Too much of a hassle to type those four characters everytime so I first checked out what ctrl+n does (which seems to be just going to the next line) and then modified my .vimrc by adding the line:

map <C-n> :noh<CR>

I never knew you could vim tabs in the command line! It is in the terminal so it's basically just ascii art and shading but you can interact with it using your mouse! (if you have "set mouse=a" in your vimrc)

vim -p firstfile secondfile

Switch with the mouse or the command gt

To comment out a block of Perl code using the single-comment character "#":

Select block of code using Ctrl-V

Press I (capital i)

Type #

Pretty basic stuff but I didn't know all of these little "tricks" so I'm just posting them in the hopes that they'll be useful to someone.

d is for delete. 0 moves to the beginning of the line (including all whitespace). ^ moves to the first character (whitespace doesn't count as a character) of the line. $ moves to the end of the line. / searches something. 

Two commands that totally saved my ass at work yesterday was change inside and change word.

The first command, you append either a single quote ('), double quote ("), html bracket (<), etc in order to change the text inside the character surrounding block. For example, with the text "random<hello>text" if you place your cursor at the "<" and then type "ci<", vim will automagically delete the text between the "<" and ">" and then put you in insert mode.

Change word, like its name implies, is used for changing the word your cursor is over. Like ci it'll delete the current word and put you in insert mode. You could even use cw over ci by putting your cursor over the "h" in "hello" rather than the surrounding characters (in the previous example).

(maketrans for you pythonistas :)) And yes, not matching the parentheses would have bothered me - blame it on Scheme.

Running the following command will replace every occurrence of 0 with u for everything you type then press Enter (key in Ctrl-D to exit):

tr '0' 'u'

Thus, using some unix command knowledge I learned from a DeCal class at UC Berkeley a simple piping addition can form a one-liner for translating text:

echo 'some random 1337 text' | tr '137' 'let'

Will output:

I'm always finding another reason to love vim (over emacs - haha jk).

Supposing I have the following lines of code:

title1 = line[i].split(" ")[1] title2 = line[i].split(" ")[2] title3 = line[i].split(" ")[3] title4 = line[i].split(" ")[4]

(Yes this code is inefficient, it's just an example, not even real) But then I realize that this code should actually start with the index 0. In vim, the change is as easy as...

Placing the cursor over "1"

Pressing "r0" in command mode (to replace the current character with "0" instead)

"j" to go down a line

"r1" to replace "2" with "1"

"j" to go down a line