Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought Author: Drew Neil | Language: English | ISBN:
1934356980 | Format: PDF
Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought Description
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--if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. Practical Vim shows you 120 vim recipes so you can quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks.
Vim, like its classic ancestor vi, is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins. 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. Run the same command on a selection of lines, or a set of files.
Discover the "very magic" switch, which 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!
You'll learn how to navigate text documents as fast as the eye moves--with only a few keystrokes. Jump from a method call to its definition with a single command. Use Vim's jumplist, so that you can always follow the breadcrumb trail back to the file you were working on before. Discover a multilingual spell-checker that does what it's told.
Practical Vim will show you new ways to work with Vim 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
- Series: Pragmatic Programmers
- Paperback: 300 pages
- Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (October 8, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1934356980
- ISBN-13: 978-1934356982
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
At the end of the day all text editors serve the following core purposes. They allow you to:
* generate text
* remove text
* navigate through text
* spot-edit text
for this Notepad, emacs, Textmate all suffice. But a *great* editor, in the hands of a master allows you to perform these tasks as efficiently as possible.
Lastly, *great* editors excel in one more criterion:
* it allows you to extend itself with complex, arbitrary collections of the above operations easily
Consider "generate text:" while one *could* type in a word character by character, a vim wizard notes that the line was entered previously and uses autocomplete-line to summon a long line of text back with two keystrokes (tip 115).
Consider "navigate through text:" again, one *could* navigate an editor by arrow keys or some key combination but Vim lets you move by word, WORD (Neil explains what a WORD is), sentence, or paragraph (tips 48-53). If you move by one character more than twice, you're probably missing something.
Consider "spot edit text:" If you need to add titles to several paragraphs and then paste them at the top of your document (say, copying chapter headers from the document and pasting them at the top to make a table of contents), one *could* make the title addition, copy header, scroll up, paste it in a table of contents, scroll back down to next header, rinse-wash-repeat OR, scroll through the document, store the titles and then hop to the top and unload the copies titles all at once, rapid-rapid fire (tips 60, 62).
It is thinking like this that makes watching a bad Vim user (or any other non-wizard editor) such a frustrating experience for Vim pros (which you will be after you grok this book).
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