Book Review: Practical Vim

There aren’t a lot of great books about Vim. Learning the vi and Vim Editors published by O’Reilly is the most popular book, and while it’s fairly detailed I’ve always felt it loses focus by including too much coverage of vi clones. The content is dry, feeling more like a standard…

Vim 101: Version Information

Reading this article will teach you the following:

• How to understand Vim’s version information
• How to check if a given build of Vim meets the requirements of a Vim script
• How this relates to Vim’s build…

Vim 101: Let

Over the last few weeks on Vim 101 I’ve been writing about :set and :setlocal. These commands are used to display and change Vim's settings. There are other times when you'll need to store values outside of built-in settings. In particular, plugin documentation may state that a variable can be set to…

Integrating Vim and GPG

In Integrating Vim and GPG by Andrew Cowie, the author describes a GPG-based workflow for encrypting notes.

He discovered vim-gnupg (GitHub: jamessan / vim-gnupg, License: GPL2) by James McCoy, which provides a transparent means of editing GPG encrypted text…

Vim 101: Auto Settings

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about :set and :setlocal, but I haven't yet touched on how Vim sets options itself. I don't usually find myself getting into a mess trying to visualise how I arrived at a particular cocktail of settings, but it's useful to have a generalised…

Vim 101: Managing Options

We’ve all been there: bursting with creativity, ready to roll, but held back by a configuration option. So we search: over to Stack Overflow, the Vim Tips wiki, and various forums and mailing lists. Then the answer is discovered: :set this-or-that, and it's added to our vimrc and…

Vim 101: Local Options

Last week I talked about managing options in Vim. If it surprised you that something as innocuous as :set has several different usages and options, then that's worth remembering when it comes to mastering Vim: even seemingly simple commands can have a lot of depth.

ViCiOUS for Xcode

ViCiOUS from 5vor9 is a commercial ($19.95) Xcode plugin that makes Xcode behave like Vim. I’ve previously talked about XVim, a Vim keybinding plugin for XCode, but ViCiOUS is more elaborate. It supports various editing modes: Normal, Visual, and Visual Block are all supported. The current mode…

Script Roundup: dragee.vim, BufNameComplete

Send in your Vim scripts for review through our contact form or @vimnews.

dragee.vim

dragee.vim by “emma-dev” is a Vim distribution that aims to improve the default settings, and make it easier to…

Script Roundup: vimcat, SlowDown.vim

Send in your Vim scripts for review through our contact form or @vimnews.

vimcat

vimcat (GitHub: kitover / vimpager) is a script for printing out syntax highlighted code to the terminal. It’s based on the…