Vim tips : Using tabs

I am an ardent fan of the versatile text editor Vim created and maintained by Bram Moolenaar. A side effect of being enamoured by this editor is that I am tempted to document each and every unique characteristics of Vim when I come to know of it. In all these many years of using Vim, I am astonished by the fact that a simple text editor such as this can show such versatility and flexibility to the extent that it can also be used by developers as a programmer's editor to write their code. I have also heard that Vim editor can be used as a plugin in the Microsoft Visual Studio in place of its default editor. Visual Studio btw, is a very popular Visual IDE albeit for Windows platform, which is the tool of choice to develop software in a wide variety of Windows specific computer languages.

So on the lines of my love affair with Vim, in the past, I have published a concise tutorial on using Vim, talked about how to make Vim more user friendly and have highlighted a couple of new features in Vim 7.0 apart from bringing news about occasions which might have an impact on Vim.

Today, I came across a very interesting article written by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier who explains the different commands which help in using tabs in Vim. As many of you are aware, tabs are one of the new features in Vim 7.0 and it is possible to use tabs in both GUI mode of Vim as well as the console mode. And tabs have proven to bring a degree of user friendliness in a variety of software with it being most evident in web browsers.

7 Habits for effective text editing 2.0

Being a Vi enthusiast, I am always on the look out for articles related to Vi, or rather Vi's modern avatar Vim - the versatile text editor created by Bram Moolenaar. In the past, this blog has seen a number of posts related to Vim. In fact if you ask me, the proverb "Too much of a thing" doesn't hold true for Vim.

It can easily take you a life time to learn each and every aspect of Vim though in most cases you can get along quite well by mastering just a couple of Vi commands. The sheer number of features and the permutations and combinations are that many. Then you have branched projects which aim to make Vim much more easier for the average computer user. Cream for Vim being a case to the point.

Today I stumbled upon this video which explains the 7 Habits for effective text editing in Vim which I found informative. The video is one of the series of Google TechTalks. In this video, Bram Moolenaar himself talks on the most efficient ways of editing text in Vim. The regular readers of this blog will know that Bram Moolenaar now works for Google.

The preamble of Google TechTalks goes thus :

Google TeckTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.

The video is a bit large (over 500 MB in size) and stretches over 1 hour. So make sure you have the required bandwidth to view the video. It is every bit worth watching.

Over 10 power user tips for Vim editor

After using Vi or Vim for a couple of days, ever been left wondering what is it that makes Vi enthusiasts sing eulogies of this geeky text editor ? Then here are a number of reasons which will make you wonder why you hadn't embraced Vim sooner.

Swaroop C H has compiled over 10 specific ways to improve your productivity with Vim. These are the same functionality he found in Emacs and for which he provides equivalent commands in Vim.

The tips include :

Swapping caps-lock and Control keys, using incremental search for navigation, Making better use of the buffers in Vim, mastering vim regular expressions and picking up fine grained text manipulation commands in Vim among many others.

Most of the settings he lists can be made permanent by entering them in your .vimrc configuration file which resides in your home directory in Linux. Of course, if you are still putoff then there is another project called Cream for Vim which will save the day for you.

Apart from providing the power user tips, he also lists some additional plugins which further extends the functionality of this wonderful editor. Do read his tips to know more.

Read more