Hacking VIM

Craig Maloney writes "Throughout the years, there have been many clones and re-implementations of the venerable vi editor. One variant of vi that emerged and stayed with us is VIM. Since its introduction, VIM has proven itself a worthy successor to the traditional vi editor. VIM has rightfully taken the place of standard vi implementations as the spiritual successor to vi, completely replacing the vi editor on many, if not all of the current Linux distributions. Many improvements have been made to VIM such as tabs, spell checking, folding, and many, many more. However many of these new enhancements may still remain hidden to anyone who isn't keeping up on the cutting edge of VIM development. Hacking VIM is a good resource for becoming more familiar with the new features of VIM and how to make them work best for you." Read below for the rest of Craig's review. Hacking VIM author Kim Schultz pages 210 publisher Packt Publishing rating 7/10 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 978-1-847190-93-2 summary A good way to wring more productivity out of an already excellent editor Hacking VIM is a short book, weighing in at a scant 210 pages. The book contains six chapters, and two appendices. The first chapter covers the history of VIM, and the lineage of vi clones that preceded it. Chapter 2 covers personalizing VIM. This chapter covers how to really take VIM and customize it for your own needs, from changing the fonts and colors for GVIM to personalizing the status bar, and using tabs. Chapter 3 deals with navigating better in VIM, whether it's in a singular file, or a group of files (which is especially important for several programming environments). Chapter 4 discusses the many productivity enhancements of VIM, such as templates, auto-completion, code folding, sessions, and the built in diff mode. Advanced formatting is covered in chapter 5, which has a few interesting tips on making code look better. Rounding out the book (and weighing in as the largest chapter of the book) is scripting VIM. VIM has excellent scripting capabilities, and this chapter covers them in great detail, from finding scripts to writing your own. Lastly, the Appendix covers some of the neat scripts available for VIM, such as a minesweeper game, and the obligatory Towers of Hanoi puzzle and mail client (because no software is considered done until it reads mail and news. :) )

Hacking VIM prefaces each tip with which version of VIM will work with each function. There were only a few instances where I noticed that a particular function was mis-marked as requiring a later version of VIM that actually worked with earlier versions. The book also contains good images which help demonstrate some of the more visual components of VIM, like tabs, folding, and the spell checker.

It is full of useful tips for getting the most out of VIM. The book is aimed at those who have already gained some familiarity with the VIM editor, and is by no means a tutorial for the novice user. There is clearly a bias in this book to the intermediate and advanced VIM users. Unfortunately, this is at odds with the first chapter, which starts with a history of the VIM editor. This wastes some of the space of the book, and would have been best used with more unique and different tips. Also, having some experience with VIM, I found certain tips weren't worth the trouble, and others quite confusing. The section on signs was a bit confusing, and I'm still unclear on why they're worth the trouble. There were several instances where I wondered what the productive benefit of a tip would be. On the other hand, I did find several tips invaluable. It's easy to overlook new functions in the CHANGELOGs, so I missed that newer versions of VIM had integrated spell-checking. Overall, Hacking VIM had enough good tips in it that I hadn't discovered on my own to make it worth the read.

Like most editors, VIM can induce editor fiddling sessions that result in little work being done, and Hacking VIM contains lots of fodder to make even the most ardent tweaker happy. Unless you carefully follow the mailing lists for VIM, and try every new feature as it is released, you might miss some really helpful productivity enhancers. My only wish for this book would be more focus on really productive tips, and less history about the other versions of vi that didn't survive. The book may have lots of "of course" items for the truly seasoned VIM user, but for those of us who don't keep up-to-date with the latest features, it is an excellent way to get more familiar with some of the truly great features that have been introduced in later VIM versions.

You can purchase Hacking VIM from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

vimdiff

[loudmax]

A few months ago I heard someone raving about the usefulness vimdiff at a Perl user group meeting. I looked into it, and it's become one of my favorite tools. In addition to the regular syntax highlighting, it highlights differences in two texts and by default folds areas that are identical. It's fantastic for programmers and also for sysadmins like me who want to compare different versions of configuration files.

I use vim every day, but I know I'm only scratching the surface of it's capabilities. There are probably a lot of others on Slashdot who use vim all the time and would stand to gain from understanding more of what it can do. I'll definitely give this book a look.

Re:vimdiff

[ScytheBlade1]

I was simply going to mod you offtopic (two points left) - but instead I decided to reply. Mostly because I'm curious.

Your comment is the typical argument: "emacs is better."

However, you do not go into why it's better. You don't even mention a slight reason as to why it's better. You state that "the rest of us" "use more decent tools" and "snicker [at those who don't]."

Would you mind qualifying your statements?
1) What is a "more decent tool"?
2) Why is this other tool better to use?
3) Who is "the rest of us"?
4) Why make this statement with nothing to back it up? If your statement is 100% qualified and "correct" - why not just give a few reasons as to why?

I really want to know why your "more decent tools" are so plainly superior that you don't even bother to qualify your statements as to why.

Re:vimdiff

[jmorris42]

> the rest of us, who use more decent tools, can just snicker.

I take it you are a code monkey developing mainstream apps, most of the more evolved ones are emacs folks. But admins and embedded folks are often working in diverse environments, many of which don't have emacs but any *NIX type environment will have vi. Busybox implements a vi clone. I seriously doubt you will find emacs on very many routers, access points, settop boxes, cell phones, etc.

Since I use so many different machines it just makes sense to default to vi/vim and stick to assuming only the default behaviour. Emacs only makes sense if you mostly use a single home directory where you can have emacs customized.

All of this talk of scripting vi made me think

[jandrese]

vim is clearly the emacs of vi clones.

Re:All of this talk of scripting vi made me think

[Citizen of Earth]

vim is clearly the emacs of vi clones.

You referenced emacs in a vi thread. I invoke Goodwin's Law!

Re:All of this talk of scripting vi made me think

[RegularFry]

I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, but that should be Godwin...

VI SUCKS!

[Seumas]

Real men use emacs, bitches!

Okay, not really -- but I thought someone should get that out of the way so we can move on.

Besides, most people who say Vi or Emacs are the best secretly use nano/ae/pico when nobody is looking and we all know you do, too.

Using vi

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you vi fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Linux Computer for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load a 2 Meg file . 20 minutes. At home, using EMACS, which by all standards should be a lot slower than vi, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Synaptic will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Firefox is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with vi, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a vi version that has run faster than its EMACS counterpart, despite vi's smaller footprint. My Windows 95 version of Notepad.exe runs faster than vi at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that vi is a superior editor.

vi addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use vi over other faster, more stable editors.

Re:Using vi

[Hatta]

LOL, best troll EVER.

Not only is this a simple edit of the classic Mac troll(scroll to the bottom), but he gets modded insightful and 8 people take him seriously. Very good job sir.

Re:Vim is painful.

[morgan_greywolf]

Nah. You can become competent with vi in a few days. Save yourself a lot of hassle. Print out one of these handy-dandy vi cheat sheets. This one's not too bad, but is poorly formatted, IMHO.

The best vi clone

[hibiki_r]

I for one would rather use emacs, but if key combinations like ctrl+alt+meta+% are beyond your manual dexterity, the best vi clone is vigor

A few years ago, I modified all of the system test environments at my workplace so that vi was just an alias to vigor. All of the administrators were thrilled with vigor's responses, including everyone's favorite: 'You pressed the right arrow key. Push OK to continue'. No OS can be considered mature (or senile) if Vigor isn't installed by default.

Re:I prefer EMACS!

[Anonymous Coward]

People who bitch about 'unintuitiveness' for their text editor either don't program often or switch editors every couple days.

Intuitiveness just means that it is not something you can just "figure out." It's not free, it comes with a trade-off. Intuitivity comes if you inject long nomenclature, multiple steps, wizards, lots of graphical icons, and so on. All these things serve as a means of keeping you from having to commit anything to memory, since you are able to visually 'figure it out' from scratch each time.

On the flip side, an editor like vi trades intuitiveness for precision and speed. Sure, you need to memorize some keys and commands, but the end result is improved speed, productivity, and precision. Like all things worth learning, there is a curve, and it is painful, but there are benefits.

Why software engineers seem to think intuitivity is something worth striving for in their tools is beyond me, very few other engineering tools strive for intuitivity. Can you just figure out how to use AutoCAD to design a house? What about a TI calculator to perform calculus? Can you just intuitively use a slide rule? Of course not, because if these tools were designed with intuitivity in mind, and not overall effectiveness when trained properly, people would not be able to be nearly as productive with them.

VIM is useful...

[david.emery]

If you need to edit the makefile for EMACS... :-)

dave

coders vs. sysadmins

[mungtor]

Coders like Emacs, sysadmins like VI. VI is small, fast, and almost always there on any system you can get to boot. Emacs is feature-packed and almost and entire development environment in itself, but it is rarely in /sbin or somewhere else that it can be useful on a crashed system.

Whether VI is good at handling 2MB files is generally irrelevant when you need to correct a typo in /etc/vfstab that's keeping one of your systems from booting. It may not be prefect, but it's better than ed.

Re:I prefer EMACS!

[spun]

What good is an unnecessary war between EMACS and vi without a comment touting the merits of ed?

Ed is the standard text editor!

Re:Vim is painful.

[jdgeorge]

You're not alone. For those who dig eclipse, there do appear to be efforts related to this, such as eclim, vimplugin, and viPlugin.

May the source be with you.