Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It's available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you'll quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 7.4 and includes three brand-new tips and five fully revised tips.

A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins who want to raise their game. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and supports most coding and markup languages.

Learn how to edit text the "Vim way": complete a series of repetitive changes with The Dot Formula using one keystroke to strike the target, followed by one keystroke to execute the change. Automate complex tasks by recording your keystrokes as a macro. Discover the "very magic" switch that makes Vim's regular expression syntax more like Perl's. Build complex patterns by iterating on your search history. Search inside multiple files, then run Vim's substitute command on the result set for a project-wide search and replace. All without installing a single plugin! Three new tips explain how to run multiple ex commands as a batch, autocomplete sequences of words, and operate on a complete search match.

Practical Vim, Second Edition will show you new ways to work with Vim 7.4 more efficiently, whether you're a beginner or an intermediate Vim user. All this, without having to touch the mouse.

What You Need:

Vim version 7.4

Table of Contents

1. The Vim Way

Tip 1. Meet the Dot Command

Tip 2. Don’t Repeat Yourself

Tip 3. Take One Step Back, Then Three Forward

Tip 4. Act, Repeat, Reverse

Tip 5. Find and Replace by Hand

Tip 6. Meet the Dot Formula

Part I — Modes

2. Normal Mode

Tip 7. Pause with Your Brush Off the Page

Tip 8. Chunk Your Undos

Tip 9. Compose Repeatable Changes

Tip 10. Use Counts to Do Simple Arithmetic

Tip 11. Don’t Count If You Can Repeat

Tip 12. Combine and Conquer

3. Insert Mode

Tip 13. Make Corrections Instantly from Insert Mode

Tip 14. Get Back to Normal Mode

Tip 15. Paste from a Register Without Leaving Insert Mode

Tip 16. Do Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations in Place

Tip 17. Insert Unusual Characters by Character Code

Tip 18. Insert Unusual Characters by Digraph

Tip 19. Overwrite Existing Text with Replace Mode

4. Visual Mode

Tip 20. Grok Visual Mode

Tip 21. Define a Visual Selection

Tip 22. Repeat Line-Wise Visual Commands

Tip 23. Prefer Operators to Visual Commands Where

Possible

Tip 24. Edit Tabular Data with Visual-Block Mode

Tip 25. Change Columns of Text

Tip 26. Append After a Ragged Visual Block

5. Command-Line Mode .

Tip 27. Meet Vim’s Command Line

Tip 28. Execute a Command on One or More Consecutive Lines

Tip 29. Duplicate or Move Lines Using ‘:t’ and ‘:m’

Commands

Tip 30. Run Normal Mode Commands Across a Range

Tip 31. Repeat the Last Ex Command

Tip 32. Tab-Complete Your Ex Commands

Tip 33. Insert the Current Word at the Command Prompt

Tip 34. Recall Commands from History

Tip 35. Run Commands in the Shell

Tip 36. Run Multiple Ex Commands as a Batch

Part II — Files

6. Manage Multiple Files

Tip 37. Track Open Files with the Buffer List

Tip 38. Group Buffers into a Collection with the Argument List

Tip 39. Manage Hidden Files

Tip 40. Divide Your Workspace into Split Windows

Tip 41. Organize Your Window Layouts with Tab Pages

7. Open Files and Save Them to Disk

Tip 42. Open a File by Its Filepath Using ‘:edit’

Tip 43. Open a File by Its Filename Using ‘:find’

Tip 44. Explore the File System with netrw

Tip 45. Save Files to Nonexistent Directories

Tip 46. Save a File as the Super User

Part III — Getting Around Faster

8. Navigate Inside Files with Motions

Tip 47. Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row

Tip 48. Distinguish Between Real Lines and Display Lines

Tip 49. Move Word-Wise

Tip 50. Find by Character

Tip 51. Search to Navigate

Tip 52. Trace Your Selection with Precision Text Objects

Tip 53. Delete Around, or Change Inside

Tip 54. Mark Your Place and Snap Back to It

Tip 55. Jump Between Matching Parentheses

9. Navigate Between Files with Jumps Tip 56. Traverse the Jump List

Tip 57. Traverse the Change List

Tip 58. Jump to the Filename Under the Cursor

Tip 59. Snap Between Files Using Global Marks

Part IV — Registers

10. Copy and Paste

Delete, Yank, and Put with Vim’s Unnamed

Register

Tip 60.

Tip 61. Grok Vim’s Registers

Tip 62. Replace a Visual Selection with a Register

Tip 63. Paste from a Register

Tip 64. Interact with the System Clipboard

11. Macros

Tip 65. Record and Execute a Macro

Tip 66. Normalize, Strike, Abort

Tip 67. Play Back with a Count

Tip 68. Repeat a Change on Contiguous Lines

Tip 69. Append Commands to a Macro

Tip 70. Act Upon a Collection of Files

Tip 71. Evaluate an Iterator to Number Items in a List

Tip 72. Edit the Contents of a Macro

Part V — Patterns

12. Matching Patterns and Literals

Tip 73. Tune the Case Sensitivity of Search Patterns

Tip 74. Use the \v Pattern Switch for Regex Searches

Tip 75. Use the \V Literal Switch for Verbatim Searches

Tip 76. Use Parentheses to Capture Submatches

Tip 77. Stake the Boundaries of a Word

Tip 78. Stake the Boundaries of a Match

Tip 79. Escape Problem Characters

13. Search

Tip 80. Meet the Search Command

Tip 81. Highlight Search Matches

Tip 82. Preview the First Match Before Execution

Tip 83. Offset the Cursor to the End of a Search Match

Tip 84. Operate on a Complete Search Match

Tip 85. Create Complex Patterns by Iterating upon Search History

Tip 86. Count the Matches for the Current Pattern

Tip 87. Search for the Current Visual Selection

14. Substitution

Tip 88. Meet the Substitute Command

Tip 89. Find and Replace Every Match in a File

Tip 90. Eyeball Each Substitution

Tip 91. Reuse the Last Search Pattern

Tip 92. Replace with the Contents of a Register

Tip 93. Repeat the Previous Substitute Command

Tip 94. Rearrange CSV Fields Using Submatches

Tip 95. Perform Arithmetic on the Replacement

Tip 96. Swap Two or More Words

Tip 97. Find and Replace Across Multiple Files

15. Global Commands

Tip 98. Meet the Global Command

Tip 99. Delete Lines Containing a Pattern

Tip 100. Collect TODO Items in a Register

Tip 101. Alphabetize the Properties of Each Rule in a CSS File

Part VI — Tools

16. Index and Navigate Source Code with ctags

Tip 102. Meet ctags

Tip 103. Configure Vim to Work with ctags

Tip 104. Navigate Keyword Definitions with Vim’s Tag

Navigation Commands

17. Compile Code and Navigate Errors with the Quickfix List

Tip 105. Compile Code Without Leaving Vim

Tip 106. Browse the Quickfix List

Tip 107. Recall Results from a Previous Quickfix List

Tip 108. Customize the External Compiler

18. Search Project-Wide with grep, vimgrep, and Others

Tip 109. Call grep Without Leaving Vim

Tip 110. Customize the grep Program

Tip 111. Grep with Vim’s Internal Search Engine

19. Dial X for Autocompletion

Tip 112. Meet Vim’s Keyword Autocompletion

Tip 113. Work with the Autocomplete Pop-Up Menu

Tip 114. Understand the Source of Keywords

Tip 115. Autocomplete Words from the Dictionary

Tip 116. Autocomplete Entire Lines

Tip 117. Autocomplete Sequences of Words

Tip 118. Autocomplete Filenames

Tip 119. Autocomplete with Context Awareness

20. Find and Fix Typos with Vim’s Spell Checker

Tip 120. Spell Check Your Work

Tip 121. Use Alternate Spelling Dictionaries

Tip 122. Add Words to the Spell File

Tip 123. Fix Spelling Errors from Insert Mode

21. Now What?

Keep Practicing!

Make Vim Your Own

Know the Saw, Then Sharpen It

A1. Customize Vim to Suit Your Preferences

Change Vim’s Settings on the Fly

Save Your Configuration in a vimrc File

Apply Customizations to Certain Types of Files

About the Author

Drew Neil is a programmer, trainer, and entrepreneur. He runs Studio Nelstrom, which specializes in making educational screencasts. At peertopeer.io he publishes live coding videos; at vimcasts.org he publishes articles and video tutorials about Vim.