Stop Complaining About Vim

I've noticed many of my students try to find any way possible to avoid using a terminal based plain text editor. They always seem to find these complex work arounds that end up being a lot more complicated than just learning how to use a terminal.

So here's a list of the most common complaints I get about vim and their "fixes". Plus a few more tricks I appreciate at the end.

Also, for newbies, don't try to learn everything at once. Just use vim without any features until you're comfortable with the i insert ESC then :w save :q workflow. Then once you're comfy, go learn something new and ad features. Redo the vimtutor every so often to learn more keystrokes. Start basic and build.

"There's no line numbers"

In your .vimrc add:

set number

"I can't use my mouse"

In your .vimrc add:

set mouse=a

"I can only open one file at a time"

:vsplit filename

Then Ctrl-w-w to switch between windows and :resize and :verical resize to change the size.

"I don't like the colors"

If the text is too dark, start with:

set bg=dark

Then if you want to toggle specific colors of specific syntax categories, use :hi. I like to turn my whitespace on so I can see tabs and spaces. I make them a dark gray that blends in with my background nice. Easy to ignore, but easy to spot inconsistencies.

set listchars=tab:>-,trail:.
set list
hi SpecialKey ctermfg=240

Find and Replace

To "comment" lines 10 through 100 (replace the front of the line (^) with a hash):

:10,100s/^/#/

To "uncomment" lines 10 through 100 (replace hashes at the start of a line with nothing):

:10,100s/^#//

Here's a quick "find and replace" tutorial in vim (it's basically just baby sed). This isn't exhaustive.

:s/find/replace/options

find and replace are straight forward. These are the pattens you want to find and replace. You can use regex and sed patterns and such. You can also replace the / with another character if you have a lot of slashes in your patterns.

You can prepend the s with:

% : All lines in the file
s,e : Where s is the starting line number and e is the ending line number. This range is inclusive
. : The current line
$ : The last line
+- : Plus or minus a certain number of lines based on the preceeding number

So :.,+5s/^/#/ comments the current line and the next 5. No prepend will only affect the current line.

Then you've got the following available options:

g : Replace all occurances in the line. By default, only the first occurance of each line is changed
c : Asks for confirmation before replacing each match
i : Ignore case

Spellcheck

:setlocal spell! spelllang=en_us,es

In my .vimrc I have it set that F6 toggles spellcheck on and off:

map <F6> :setlocal spell! spelllang=en_us,es<CR>

Man Pages

If you add these lines to your .vimrc:

runtime! ftplugin/man.vim
let g:ft_man_open_mode = "vert"

You enable the man page plugins. Then you can use :Man to open man pages in splitscreen. You can also use !man for a similar effect without the plugin, but I prefer seeing my code and the manual side by side.