Vim101

If you’ve managed to fit tabs into your workflow, then you’ve probably noticed curious numbers and signs that appear alongside the truncated filename. It’s very easy to read this information once you know how: the number refers to the number of split windows in a tab, and the +…

I often find myself using Visual mode purely to figure out the best motion to use for a given task. For example, let’s say I’m trying to duplicate the following function’s body:

function specialAdd(a, b) {
  if (!a || !b) {…

Discovering and retaining good habits for file navigation is one way to vastly improve your productivity when using Vim. Other than jumps and searching, text object motions are also a great way for skipping around a file like a Vim virtuoso.

Moving around a file efficiently can improve your productivity, but it takes a while to get the hang of Vim’s jumps. Last week I wrote some tips for practicing marks — ideas for working marks into your daily workflow. Marks and jumps are closely related, mainly because…

Two weeks ago I wrote a Vim 101 on tags, which introduced the basics for working with Vim’s tag navigation tools. Something that I hinted at was using tags to help visualise a project’s structure. Although Vim’s raw editing operations are incredibly powerful, some of us need help in trying to…

Continuing on from last week’s Vim 101 on tags, another useful element to a tag-based workflow is the preview window (:help preview-window). There's only ever one preview window per tab page, and it can be used to display tag definitions without interruption.