Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought, 2nd Edition

Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It’s available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you’ll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you’ll quickly learn the editor’s core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 7.4 and includes three brand-new tips and five fully revised tips.

A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins who want to raise their game. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and supports most coding and markup languages.

Learn how to edit text the “Vim way”: complete a series of repetitive changes with The Dot Formula using one keystroke to strike the target, followed by one keystroke to execute the change. Automate complex tasks by recording your keystrokes as a macro. Discover the “very magic” switch that makes Vim’s regular expression syntax more like Perl’s. Build complex patterns by iterating on your search history. Search inside multiple files, then run Vim’s substitute command on the result set for a project-wide search and replace. All without installing a single plugin! Three new tips explain how to run multiple ex commands as a batch, autocomplete sequences of words, and operate on a complete search match.

Practical Vim, Second Edition will show you new ways to work with Vim 7.4 more efficiently, whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate Vim user. All this, without having to touch the mouse.

What You Need:

Vim version 7.4

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Vim Way

Part I Modes
Chapter 2. Normal Mode
Chapter 3. Insert Mode
Chapter 4. Visual Mode
Chapter 5. Command-Line Mode

Part II Files
Chapter 6. Manage Multiple Files
Chapter 7. Open Files and Save Them to Disk

Part III Getting Around Faster
Chapter 8. Navigate Inside Files with Motions
Chapter 9. Navigate Between Files with Jumps
Chapter Part IV—Registers
Chapter 10. Copy and Paste
Chapter 11. Macros

Part V Patterns
Chapter 12. Matching Patterns and Literals
Chapter 13. Search
Chapter 14. Substitution
Chapter 15. Global Commands

Part VI Tools
Chapter 16. Index and Navigate Source Code with ctags
Chapter 17. Compile Code and Navigate Errors with the Quickfix List
Chapter 18. Search Project-Wide with grep, vimgrep, and Others
Chapter 19. Dial X for Autocompletion
Chapter 20. Find and Fix Typos with Vim’s Spell Checker
Chapter 21. Now What?
Appendix A. Customize Vim to Suit Your Preferences