Scripts of 2014

I’ve been going over the Script Roundup posts of 2014 to find the things that I still use, enjoyed trying out, or had the most GitHub stars. People have

Textabyss

Textabyss by Liang Li is a plugin for panning around lots of files. It organises files into columns, and allows you to scroll through columns quickly using the mouse. It’s a unique idea that’s best explained in a video.

Better Whitespace

Better Whitespace (GitHub: ntpeters / vim-better-whitespace) by Nate Peterson is a plugin for highlighting trailing whitespace.

Whitespace for the current line will not be highlighted while in insert mode. It is possible to disable current line highlighting while in other modes as well (see options below). A helper function :StripWhitespace is also provided to make whitespace cleaning painless.

Once it’s installed you can toggle whitespace with :ToggleWhitespace, or even just toggle the current line with :CurrentLineWhitespaceOff.

daddy.vim

jdaddy.vim (GitHub: tpope / vim-jdaddy, License: MIT) by Tim Pope is a set of useful mappings for working with JSON.

aj is a text object for the outermost JSON object, and gqaj pretty prints the JSON under the cursor. There's also gwaj, which merges JSON from a register into the outermost JSON object.

There are more features that are documented in doc/jdaddy.txt. The source itself is interesting — there’s a parse function that uses some monster regular expressions.

9md

t9md’s GitHub profile has some cool Vim projects. One that I like is vim-choosewin, a tmux-inspired window numbering system.

v

v is like z for Vim:

v uses viminfo’s list of recently edited files to open one quickly no
matter where you are in the filesystem.

By default, it will open the most recently edited file matching all of
the provided regular expressions.

Rogue.vim

Rogue.vim (GitHub: katono / rogue.vim, License: MIT) by Kato Noriaki is a Vim implementation of the game Rogue. It requires Lua-enabled Vim, which I installed with brew install vim --with-lua.

If you don’t already know, Rogue uses hjkl for movement, so it's a great excuse to play a game while practising essential Vim skills. This version includes lots of useful stuff, like the Rogue man page, guide, and also documentation for rogue.vim itself.

There are other Vim Rogue-likes, but this is the most complete version that I’ve seen.

vim-lambdify

Some languages make heavy use of lambdas to the point that you may like to fold them. vim-lambdify (GitHub: calebsmith / vim-lambdify) by Caleb Smith is a plugin that conceals lambdas and inline functions with a lambda character.

It supports Python, JavaScript, and Scheme. It works by replace text for display, but not when the file is saved:

Plugins such as vim-haskellConceal and vim-cute-python use this to replace many different things with more pithy/mathy symbols. The approach taken here is to replace only lambdas, but to do so for many different languages to avoid having to use many plugins for a single feature.

I imagine this would look really cool in functional languages if you use the λ character.

smartpairs

smartpairs (GitHub: gorkunov / smartpairs.vim, License: wtfpl) by Alexander Gorkunov is a plugin for visually selecting ranges based on brackets or quotes, without needing to type the brackets or quotes. So rather than vi{ you can type viv -- the last v will cause the plugin to search for the pair of the symbol under the cursor. It's a nice tweak to the existing behaviour that seems easy to learn.