usevim

What is modern Vim?

Drew Neil, the author of Practical Vim and Vimcasts is writing a new book called Modern Vim. Modern Vim is a great title and captures the significance of Vim 8 and Neovim: both of these versions add key features that streamline plugin management and improve the responsiveness of Vim’s UI (even…

Spacemacs Review and Introduction for Vim Users

Spacemacs is an Emacs distribution that feels like Vim when editing, but doesn’t attempt to completely emulate Vim. It’s modal, so it has Normal mode, Insert mode, and loads of the editing, movement, and search commands that we use in Vim every…

Welcome to the new usevim

I’ve moved usevim to Medium. All 530 posts have been migrated, and I hand checked each of them for issues. That includes messed up code listings where the importer sometimes forgot to close code blocks, and issues where subheadings got lost.

Vim 8.0

Vim 8.0 is finally out! The Vim 8.0 announcement includes an overview of the main features of this major release. One of the significant changes is asynchronous I/O, which means plugins can execute without blocking Vim’s UI. The communication protocol used for this supports JSON, which means you can write servers…

In Editor Linting with Syntastic

In this post I’m going to talk about setting up Syntastic in Vim, and why it’s an important development tool. Syntastic is plugin that runs files through external syntax checkers (linters). It’s capable of using built-in Vim features (statusline, sign, location-list) to…

Holiday

I’m going to take a break from usevim for a few weeks. We’re about to have our second child, so things are going to be busy for a while!

Please keep sending in your scripts, colour schemes, and links to tutorials. I’ll publish again soon.

vimtex

Karl Yngve Lervåg sent in vimtex (GitHub: lervag/vimtex), a script with lots of commands and mappings for LaTeX authors. It’s inspired by LaTeX-Box, but is written from scratch with extensibility in mind.

Vimtex includes motions for section navigation and moving between matching delimiters…

Ferret

Ferret (GitHub: wincent/ferret) by Greg Hurrell is a search plugin that offers asynchronous search, multi-file replace, args list/argdo support, and QuickFix listing enhancements.

It supports The Silver Searcher, Ack, and grep. Asynchronous support is done with dispatch.vim — you have to…

Terminus: Improved Terminal Support

Terminus (GitHub: wincent/terminus) by Greg Hurrell is a plugin for improving Vim’s integration with terminals, with features designed for tmux and iTerm. Features include:

• Cursor shape in Insert mode: thin vertical bar in the console