Intro to Vim

This blog is about introduction to one of the coolest, highly configurable text editor for efficiently creating and changing any kind of text i.e Vim.

Why to use Vim

Learning to drive a car takes effort. Is that a reason to keep driving your bicycle? No, you realize you need to invest time to learn a skill. Text editing isn’t different. You need to learn new commands and turn them into a habit.

- Bram Moolenaar

• It’s fast
• I don’t need to remember
• Light on fingers
• persistent, multi-level undo tree
• extensive plugin system
• support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
• powerful search and replace
• integrates with many tools

History

Bram Moolenaar began working on Vim in 1988 for a company called Amiga. He published first public release of Vim in 1991. The name Vim is an acronym for VI improved because Vim is an extended version of vi editor. It was built with the aim of adding some additional features designed to help in source code editing.

Interface of Vim

Vim is based on text user interface and like other text editors, it also has a GUI mode, gVim. Vim has a built-in tutorial for beginners(vimtutor command). Vim also has a built-in facility (:help command) which allow the user to search, explore and query commands.

A little Walk-through of Vim

Starting Vim

    vim <file name>
    vim +NUM <file-name>
    vim +/{pattern} <file-name>
    vim +cmd or -c cmd <file-name>

Exiting Vim

• In normal mode

  • :q! Quit Vim without saving the changes to the file.
  • ZQ Same as :q! Quits Vim without writing changes

• Or

  • Ctrl + z To send vim back in background
  • $fg To get back in vim

Save

• :w Save the file
• :w new_name Save the file with the new_name filename
• :wq Save the file and quit Vim.
• ZZ Write file, if modified, and quit Vim

Special inserts

• :r [filename] Insert the file [filename] below the cursor
• :r ![command] Execute [command] and insert its output below the cursor

Delete text

• x delete the character at cursor
• dw delete a word.
• d0 delete to the beginning of a line.
• d$ delete to the end of a line.
• d) delete to the end of the sentence.
• dgg delete to the beginning of the file.
• dG delete to the end of the file.
• dd delete line
• 3dd delete three lines

Simple replace text

• r{text} Replace the character under the cursor with {text}
• R Replace characters instead of inserting them

Copy/Paste text

• yy copy current line into storage buffer
• p paste storage buffer after current line
• P paste storage buffer before current line

Undo/Redo operation

• u undo the last operation.
• Ctrl+r redo the last undo.

Search and Replace keys

• /search_text search document for search_text going forward
• ?search_text search document for search_text going backwards
• n move to the next instance of the result from the search
• N move to the previous instance of the result
• :%s/original/replacement Search for the first occurrence of the string “original” and replace it with “replacement”
• :%s/original/replacement/g Search and replace all occurrences of the string “original” with “replacement”
• :%s/original/replacement/gc Search for all occurrences of the string “original” but ask for confirmation before replacing them with “replacement”

Navigation keys

• h moves the cursor one character to the left.
• j or Ctrl + J moves the cursor down one line.
• k or Ctrl + P moves the cursor up one line.
• l moves the cursor one character to the right.
• 0 moves the cursor to the beginning of the line.
• $ moves the cursor to the end of the line.
• ^ moves the cursor to the first non-empty character of the line
• w move forward one word (next alphanumeric word)
• W move forward one word (delimited by a white space)
• 5w move forward five words
• b move backward one word (previous alphanumeric word)
• B move backward one word (delimited by a white space)
• 5b move backward five words
• G move to the end of the file
• gg move to the beginning of the file.

Modes

• Normal Mode
• Insert Mode
• Command Mode
• Visual Mode

Insert Mode -> Normal Mode

• Esc Normal Mode
• Ctrl [ Same as above

Auto Completion

You can start from a built-in omnifunc setting. Just put:

filetype plugin on
au FileType php setl ofu=phpcomplete#CompletePHP
au FileType ruby,eruby setl ofu=rubycomplete#Complete
au FileType html,xhtml setl ofu=htmlcomplete#CompleteTags
au FileType c setl ofu=ccomplete#CompleteCpp
au FileType css setl ofu=csscomplete#CompleteCSS

on the bottom of your .vimrc, then type in insert mode.

NeoVim

NeoVim also quoted as Literally the future of Vim is known for the cool and awesome features.

• Powerful The Nvim msgpack API enables structured communication to and from any programming language. Remote plugins run as co-processes that communicate with Neovim safely and asynchronously.

• Usable

  • Strong defaults
  • Works the same everywhere: one build-type, one command
  • Modern terminal features such as cursor styling, focus events, bracketed paste
  • Built-in terminal emulator
• Embeddable GUIs and other applications can nvim —embed to discover the msgpack API dynamically.
• Drop-in Vim Neovim is an extension of Vim: feature-parity and backwards-compatibility are high priorities. If you already use Vim, see :help nvim-from-vim.

Other features

And below are some of the simple and elegant commands used to indent lines quickly in Vim or gVim.

• gg=G The master of all commands is. This indents the entire file!
• == To indent the current line
• =G To indent all the lines below the current line
• n== To indent n lines below the current line
• =% To indent a block of code, go to one of the braces and use the command

These are the simplest, yet powerful commands to indent multiple lines.

CheatSheet