Venturing into Vim – Week 3: Premium Video
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Venturing into Vim – Week 3: Premium Video

Tutorial Details
  • Topic: Vim Editor
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Availability: Premium Exclusive
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Some say it’s a decade-old piece of junk; others widely consider it to be the best code editor available. I’m on a quest to find out for myself. So, for four weeks (and four screencasts to track my progress), I will use nothing but Vim.

Along the way, if you choose to join me, I’ll share what I’ve learned, what frustrated me, and everything that falls in between. If you’ve been hoping to venture into Vim territory, there’s no better time to do so! Let’s do it together. Gain access to this screencast series, as well as many others by becoming a Premium member.


Week 3

In this third episode about Vim, we learn about:

  • The Command-T plugin
  • Working with the Surround plugin
  • Change Inner
  • Creating custom dictionary files
  • The Tidy plugin
  • Working with Visual mode
  • Omni-completion

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  • http://andrewburgess.ca Andrew Burgess

    Loving this series; I’m pretty much committed to using Vim, and each week so far has given me a few new tips to try. Keep up the great work, Jeffrey!

    I’m curious: are you getting the feeling that you’ll stick with Vim after your experimental month is over?

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      80% sure.

      Learning to use Vim is how I would imagine quitting smoking feels. Sometimes, I desperately just want to use a simple code editor. I have to restrain myself…because I know, eventually, I won’t have that craving anymore.

      • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
        Author

        One of my bigger gripes is the fact that Vim *requires* an excellent .vimrc file to be functional. For new comers who have to build one from scratch…that’s a big pain, and would deter most people right from the beginning.

        Editors like MacVim should have a basic file premade…or maybe a huge commented .vimrc file. That way, if you want a certain functionality, you only have to uncomment it.

      • Joshua

        I started with vim a couple weeks ago. (well, re-started… lots of starts and stops before…)

        After 2 full weeks, (longest stint before was a day or two) I was got aggravated and went back to textmate… for about 10 minutes, then I realized that having used vim, I had “outgrown” textmate enough already to not really like using it. Modes “feel” right to me now.

        Funny thing is, I’ve hit escape like 4 times writing this to go fix an error or change something…

        :w

      • Michael Kral

        LOL, good analogy. I just quit smoking and started using VIM.

  • http://ingo-fahrentholz.com Ingo Fahrentholz

    Hi Jeff, nice new SC.

    One little thing I could tell you because I have seen as you wanted to edit the script.js file you asked yourself “if I have one”, well I felt the same and you could instead of doing : e. all the time you could just do:

    : e ->double tab and you get the list of the files of the folder you’re in. Same thing for browsing just tip
    : cd -> double tab and you get a list of all folders

    Greetz Ingo F :)

    P.S. I hope you cover in any further SC how to use CVS / SVN / GIT with VIM (would be great) (:

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Ah good tip. Thanks!

  • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
    Author

    By the way, sorry guys. I kept referring to “braces” as “brackets.” :) Just noticed that.

  • Nathan

    Awesome post! I am trying to teach myself as well…though I am on Windows so there were some things that didn’t work. One of them was the ctrl-u ctrl-o for omnicomplete. In windows I found out the key command is ctrl-n.

    Also those using windows that wants to open the file in chrome or firefox it isn’t that hard here is what I did in vimrc

    “Opens file in buffer in Chrome
    abbrev ch :! @start “” /b “C:\Users\YourUserNameHere\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” %:p

    “Opens file in buffer in Firefox
    abbrev ff :! @start “” /b “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” %:p

    Of course you will need to adjust those locations of the programs, but I found them helpful!

    Keep it up Jeff! Just signed up for premium content! Really because of this screencast! :)

    • Nathan

      Opps apparently my Dad has an avatar and I accidentally entered his email address instead of mine :) Oh well! Hope you find them useful anyways! LOL!

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      That’s great, Nathan. And thanks for the Windows tips!

      • Nathan

        No problem. I love the series! It has made me dive into how to get some of the same things you have working…but for my windows machine. Next thing to get into is maybe the Linux side of these.

    • wl

      Hi, thanks for the code!
      Works great, except every time I use it, a cmd.exe window pops up (using Windows 7, 64bit)
      I got it fixed by using

      abbrev ff :silent ! @start /b “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” %:p

      Hope it helps someone else :)

  • http://twitter.com/garbaczd David Garbacz

    Loving this series and it’s teaching me so much about such a great editor. I’ve been using TextMate / Notepad ++ all of the time and I’m definitely going to be working Vim into my Mac arsenal. It just doesn’t seem as easy going on Windows.

    Also Jeff, I didn’t see a way to just download the screencast, only stream. Any way you could put a download link?

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Sure, just right-click on the screencast link to download it to your computer.

  • http://chriskdesigns.com Chris Klosowski

    This is a great series. Ive been bouncing around IDEs for some time now and my old fallback for speed and just getting the job done is VIM.

    Its amazing how something can be right at your finger tips and elude you for so long because of the illusion of the convenience factor.