Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?

Posted by timothy on from the make-it-roll-over dept.

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?"

4 of 702 comments (clear)

  1. Filter Lines by saberworks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Use visual mode (shift-v) to highlight lines, then shell out to external programs to filter them, such as perltidy. To do that, with lines highlighted, type !perltidy (assuming you have it on your machine). This lets you filter specific lines instead of the whole file.

  2. Couple off-hand by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not horribly exciting ones, but useful:

    xp - reverse next two characters
    dL - Delete to end of page, in other words, everything visible.
    C - Often overlooked: chop off end of line and go into insert mode.

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  3. Re:Just using VIM by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 5, Interesting

    main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).

    vi is part of the Single UNIX Specification, so anything passing itself off as UNIX must include vi. Even without the spec, it's much, much more universal than emacs, and more powerful than pico/nano.

    --
    "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
  4. Re:Just using VIM by Adam+Hazzlebank · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The one I find really useful is .,+20s/foo/bar/g

    Replace all occurrences in the next 20 lines from the current line only. Great when your editing code and you've realised you used the wrong variable name in that method for example.