In this post, I’ll just list some things I love about Vim. This post is not intended to teach you how to use Vim, I won’t deeply explain the commands I use, I just want you to see how easy things can be with Vim.
Repeatable commands
Something I love about Vim is that it allows you to repeat commands. And I don’t mean macros, I’m talking about the power of the . operator, which repeats the last thing you made. It’s one of my favourite commands as it gives you quite a lot of power. A very common use case is changing the name of a variable in a file:
What I did was simply step on the word I want to change, press * to search for the next occurrence. Once I’m on it, I simply change it to something else, the Vim way to do it is cw<Type text here><ESC>. Now comes the fun part, Using n. I search for the next word, and repeat my last action, which was change it’s name, running n. again gets the job done. The complete command list used is *cwSomethingeElse<ESC>n.n.
Another common use for this is spacing and formatting lines, for example, if we wanted to space all + signs in this statement, we can get away with repeating commands again.
The full command here is f+s + <ESC>;.;.;., nothing too different, only that instead of using * we actually use a motion to move to the plus sign using f+, because of this, the next command changes and instead of using n we use ;
Formatting code
Normally I limit my lines to 80 columns. So I have textwidth set to 80 in my .vimrc file. With this I can use gq to format a selection to 80 columns.
You can of course always format code using =, even though sometimes it breaks… Note the usage of % which matches the closing tag of an element, which is extremely handy, especially in visual line mode and HTML.
The full command list used there is Vl%=, that’s it.
Visual block mode
Vim has several selection modes, most of the time I use line mode but this one is super handy and works similarly to Sublime’s multiple cursors.
Visual block mode is accessed though <Ctrl-V> in Vim, but it also works with <Ctrl-Q> which I prefer.
Sorting CSS lines
Sorting is as easy as selecting the lines and using the :sort command.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg
Everything I’ve showed requires no plugins, is just plain old Vim. If you want to try it out, I recommend Practical Vim, it’s a really good book, only with reading the first few chapters you can already get a taste of Vim’s power!