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: 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.

Vim 101: Buffers

When I first started using Vim the thing that confused me the most was buffers. The editors that I used before simply showed windows or tabs for each open file — if a file wasn’t visible it was closed. Buffers are confusing to beginners because they seem to hang around even when the associated…

Vim 101: Search and Replace

In this article I assume the reader has a basic knowledge of regular expressions. To read about how Vim uses regular expressions, take a look at the pattern section of the Vim manual in :help pattern.

Substitution

Introduction to Syntax Highlighting

There are good reasons to have a working knowledge of Vim’s syntax highlighting system: perhaps you don’t like the way a certain file type is handled, or maybe you’d like to add support for a new language or file format. It’s also possible to fix or replace the…

The Importance of the Home Row

Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to.

Securing Vim

What attack vectors does Vim open up? Over the years various vulnerabilities have been discovered, and thankfully most of these issues have been fixed. However, before connecting to that sensitive server and editing a file, it’s a good idea to be aware of Vim’s previous vulnerabilities.