There’s been an amazing response on HackerNews and the programming Reddit on the recent articles from Jeff and Vincent, people were learning a lot from them so that motivated me to write my own version.
In my opinion you never stop learning Vim and reading about other people’s experiences and tricks is one of the best ways to keep learning.
A lot of the basic things were already covered by the previous mentioned articles so I wanted to do it a bit differently. Instead of a just a list with usefull commands I want to show you my way of thinking about Vim which will hopefully make you a better Vim user.
In my experience it doesn’t take long before you can get up and running with Vim and be able to edit files. You’re probably not as productive as you were before and keep grabbing that pesky mouse but don’t worry, you took the first step. It’s all a learning process from here. That is also one of the great things about choosing to ‘learn’ an editor, it’s always great to look back and see how much you’ve learned!
One of the best tips I can give about using Vim efficiently is also applicable to other areas in programming and using a computer in general. Learn to recognize patterns. In Vim there’s almost always a better and faster way to do things, with or without plugins.
For example, a novice Vim user will probably delete words by keep hitting the x key, this is a moment you need to stop and think about how you can do this better, or the Vim way. Naturally you’ll soon come across the w motion for words, and learn to combine it with d for delete or c for change to form dw or cw to delete or change whole words.
You can keep building on that same idea about combining motions and even incorporate Vim objects into the mix. For example you can delete everything inside a tag block with dit or use ci" to change everything wrapped inside double quotes. Now you’ll begin to truly see the capabilities of Vim and how it can help you be more productive.
Something I used to do was use visual line mode to select lines of code, or def/end blocks in Ruby to delete a whole method for example. That’s when I looked around and learned about paragraphs. The def and end blocks in Ruby form a perfect example for this. Instead of going into visual mode and scrolling down or up to select a block you can use motion commands tied to paragraphs to do this faster and with less keystrokes.
Try using vip or v} at the beginning of a block to select it all in one go.
When writing this article I found myself reformatting a lot of stuff to fit in a 80 columns layout by hand. One quick search later I now know you can use gq to automatically reformat a block of text.
You can do a lot with a default build of Vim, but in my opinion if you take some time to customize your Vim a bit you will feel greater pleasure of working with it. There’s something to be said for just using a default version, so you can find your way on whatever system you are, but in my case the customizations aren’t that severe that I can’t work on a default setup at all, I would just be a bit less efficient.
Based on my own experience I think it’s good to warn people not to go overboard with customizations and plugins, a person can only learn a couple of things a day so just take it slow. Take lesson from the previous section and only go looking for a plugin when you feel you’re not doing something right, or that it can be automated. I had a time where I was on the lookout for fresh plugins everyday, instead of just working with what I had.
These are a couple of plugins I’m using that I can not do without, they each gave me a huge boost to my productivity.
TextMate’s open file window works great and as such has been ‘copied’ a lot, in the beginning I was using fuzzyfinder_textmate but after finding Command-T I will never go back. Because part of it is in C it’s speed is amazing, even in a large codebase you won’t have to wait for searchresults. This tool is pretty invaluable to me for being able to quickly navigate a project’s codebase.
It’s pretty smart as well as it has an weighting algorithm so you can get the result you need with few keystrokes, so for example characters that follow a path seperator will be weighted more. Take a look at the following, I only need 4 keystrokes ( acat ) to get the file that I want.
app/controllers/admin/tracks_controller.rb
For this plugin to work you need to have your Vim compiled with Ruby support, depending on your Vim of choice (I use MacVim myself) a recompile is probably necessary. For instructions on how to do this with MacVim, the plugins creator has some information on his wiki
Ack is an great replacement for grep and blazingly fast. It’s pretty amazing as you can give it a string and it will recursively find every occurance of it in record speed, a great way to search your whole codebase. I use it if I’m not quite sure where a certain piece of code is located or if I need to change a certain string and want to make sure I’ve not forgotten any occurance.
The searchresults open in a quickfix window so you can use the standard :cn (:cnext) or :cp (:cprevious) commands to navigate these quickly.
Check out :h quickfix for more of these commands.
I could be doing a lot more with this plugin as it featureset is just so expansive. I mostly use the navigation shortcuts like R to open the corresponding file when my cursor is over a controller action for example. This works with splits and tabs as well so just add R or T after it.
If you’re customizing your Vim you’re probably using some plugins as well. In my first few months of using Vim I was just using them out of the box, not really tapping into their full potential. For example I was using NERDTree to open files. Because I love using different tabs for files I was always opening a new tab, toggling NERDTree again and find myself having to traverse the whole directory structure again. I was actually doing the same thing with Command-T.
After a while I decided to read the help documentation for these plugins, which was something I should have done a lot earlier! Turns out you can use i to open in a split or t for a new tab from within the file list in NERDTree. With this new knowledge I could navigate my projects a lot faster.
I also had a custom keybinding to refresh a projects files because NERDTree doesn’t automatically add new files to the file overview. A quick glance at the help documentation and I learned to use r and R to recursively refresh the current directory or the current root.
All the plugins you are using probably work fine but if you take the effort of going through the help files I will bet there’s loads of functionality you weren’t aware of yet!
If you’re using Pathogen to bundle all your plugins into one directory, you can use the following command to generate all plugins helpdocs.
:call pathogen#helptags()
My final advice, and something I hope will have been read between the lines is that you should never stop learning. just today I started using Lusty Juggler because I was linked to a screencast showing how to use it. I’ve always been a window and tab user, but I’ll try out buffers to see how I like it.
If you’re starting out with Vim you’re probably learning a lot, and it can be a lot to take in. Try learning about things you can put to use right away, I find that using it often is one of the best ways to learn a new command. I write a lot of stuff down in a notebook and if I don’t use it often I find myself going back to look it up.