By: tcol

tcol — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:19:16 +0000

The geek vids are great. Thanks!

By: jjulian

jjulian — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:08:18 +0000

Great job, Bryan! I used to teach vi way back in the day. Here are some more tips for manipulating text:

You can preface many commands with a number, indicating the number of chars or words or lines you want to work on.

5dd (delete the next 5 lines)
10yy (yank the next 10 lines)
p (put the yanked/deleted lines below the caret)

Working with words - you can change words or delete words

3cw (puts you in edit mode to overwrite the next 3 words)
5dw (delete the next 5 words)

'u' is Undo

Joining lines - use capital J on a line to pull up the next line

Doing the same thing over and over again? Hit period to repeat the last command. Works really well when deleting indentation - 4x (delete 4 spaces), then down arrow, period, down arrow, period, etc

Capital G is "go". So 30G goes to line 30. ctrl-g shows you status (current line #)

You can specify blocks using numbers too. Bryan, you touched on this with g and G. If you want to work on lines 5 thru 16, you could type :5,16d (to delete them for example)

This was always one of my favorite vi cheatsheets: http://www.eec.com/business/vi.html

Have fun in vim! BTW, I use vim all the time, but for serious coding I stay in TextMate. :)

By: kossnocorp

kossnocorp — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:51:25 +0000

Awesome!

By: kblake

kblake — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:37:51 +0000

Great job. Practical and useful. Will be using these commands today! Thank you!

By: Lucas d'Acampora Prim

Lucas d'Acampora Prim — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:18:46 +0000

good post! I´m getting to know vim, this was very useful!
would love to see some screencasts on tim pope´s plugins, they seem great!

By: François Beausoleil

François Beausoleil — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:17:36 +0000