Slashdot Mirror
(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?
haroldag writes "I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what's out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
If you are on a single box, that is fine. But when you have to admin about 500 servers, spread out across the country, and sometimes over a dial-up link, you often don't have a graphical environment available. Even on the local network, I often ssh from one box to the next, and forget to forward my X11 connections. Since vi is always available, that is what I use.
The other thing is that I appreciate having only minimal hand movement to get around a file and make changes. Much like people used to love the Word Star diamond, the same thing with vi's ctrl-f, ctrl-b, h, j, k, l, etc. And since I've been using it for about 20 years, these commands are second nature to me. Not to mention the search/replace supporting regular expressions (something a lot of gui word processors don't have).
Try using most GUI editors on a remote server over ssh. Kate may be an exception with KDE's nice network abstraction I don't know (I use Gnome), but to be honest for me the main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).
When did Slashdot become Stack Overflow?
Ah, add "set compatible" to your .vimrc file and you have 99% vi behavior.
Why would you use plain vi, when vim is so much better?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I use Vim primarily because I can perform almost any task without moving my fingers from the standard typing position. I certainly feel much more efficient being able to (for example) use j/k/l/h for movement than moving my hand over to the arrow keys, or worst, to the mouse. That's one of many tasks which simply becomes natural over time (in fact, when I'm typing in a web form, I frequently find myself trying to use Vi shortcuts) and which really make things go more smoothly for me. Even when I'm on a full desktop, I prefer using Vim. I only wish the OS X port of gvim worked better.
The reason that I don't use EMACS is because of the finger gymnastics you have to perform for even the simplest of tasks. Of course, one could complain similarly about Vi--having to switch to command mode is something that gets just about every single newbie.
Amen. Know vi, and know the bourne shell, and you're good on close to 100% of the unix machines you'll ever touch.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
The learning curve is worth it, though. If you need to edit text quite a bit, it makes sense to make it efficient.
I personally recommend trying to learn Vim alongside with another editor, or using a GUI frontend like GVim.
Replace Vim or GVim with any editor of your choice.
http://sourcemage.org/ - Have fun
You do realize you can bind macros to keys in vi too? I've never understood this absurd argument from emacs people..