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: 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: Getting Help

Vim’s documentation is amazingly detailed and consistent. It’s usually the first place I look for help, before even lazily typing in a query into a search engine. Admittedly, the documentation can be daunting for beginners. Let’s address that now!

Navigation and Context

Most IDEs have a graphical drawer that displays a list of files and folders in a project. Although this is a slow way to navigate between files (hunting for a file visually rather than searching), it provides a useful representation of the project.

Do You Use Split Windows?

Somebody recently asked me if I use split windows in Vim. The answer is of course an emphatic “Yes!”, but why?

It actually depends on the work I’m doing. When writing prose, I’ll typically use a single window and only split it if I need to refer to another…

Vim 101: Undo

You’ll notice experienced Vim users switch back into Normal mode as often as is practical. One reason for this is due to the way Vim tracks changes in a buffer. A change is a command entered in the Normal or Command-line modes, or edits made while Insert mode is active. Pressing u or typing :undo will…