Vim 101: Quick Movement

This is the first Vim 101 post, in which we take a look at fundamental Vim techniques. If you’re a beginner or would like to brush up on fundamental skills, then this is the series for you.

Git and Vimdiff

Vimdiff is my favourite diff tool. I’ve used many others, but I always come back to good old vimdiff. Git comes with git diff (man page: man git-diff) which shows the changes between various things Git knows about -- it's possible to show the changes between the working tree and the index, changes…

Vim 101: What is the Leader Key?

You’re happily using Vim, slowly mastering file navigation, split windows and tabs, search and replace, and then you discover a hot new .vimrc on Hacker News that includes lots of commands like this:

noremap <Leader>W :w !sudo tee % > /dev/null

Vim 101: Set Hidden

If you’re looking for a good way to learn new Vim skills, then you can discover a lot from someone’s ~/.vimrc. Searching for dotfile repositories on sites like GitHub is a good start. On one such dotfile diving session I noticed how often set hidden crops up. The documentation for set hidden…

Vim 101: ed and ex

When I first started using Vim, I didn’t really appreciate its relationship with ed. My first experience with ed started when a Unix system (Solaris circa 1998) had been configured with it as the default editor. I ran something like crontab -e and entered a world of confusion:

Vim 101: Completion Compendium

Vim has context-sensitive completion, based on the current mode. When in Insert mode, there’s actually a whole slew of completion types (:help ins-completion). The one most people know is CTRL-P: keyword completion (:help i_CTRL-P). This finds the previous match for a word…

Vim 101: QuickFix and Grep

QuickFix is designed to display compiler errors — a list of errors is displayed and can be selected to jump to a specific file and line. It’s also used for :vimgrep -- each item in the results list is displayed and can be used to navigate between files.

Vim 101: Editing Remote Files

Vim supports transparent remote file editing through netrw. It's available by default when nocompatible is enabled -- for more help on setting it up have a look at :help netrw-start and :help netrw-activate.