Book Image

Hacking Vim 7.2

By : Kim Schulz
Book Image

Hacking Vim 7.2

By: Kim Schulz

Overview of this book

<p>Vim is one of the most powerful open-source editors used by programmers and system administrators around the world. While Vim itself is inherently a powerful editor, personalizing it to suit your needs can be a daunting task. However, it is possible to do so with the help of this book.<br /><br />This book contains examples that cover everything from personalizing Vim according to the your work cycle to optimizations that will boost the your productivity. The main focus of this book is to make your life, as a Vim user, easier.<br /><br />Each chapter deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.<br /><br />This book is written for Vim 7.2, the latest stable version. This latest version of Vim includes many new features like spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and much more.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Hacking Vim 7.2
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Script development


At some point when using Vim, you might find a feature it does not have, and which you need it to have. So now is probably a good time to learn how to make your own scripts for Vim such that you can add this missing functionality.

However, before you start, there are a couple of questions you should consider.

First of all, you should make sure that no one else has already created a script that adds what you need—why invent the wheel again? If someone has created a script that does nearly what you need, then why not just help the developer by adding the extra features to that script and thereby make it work for both him or her and you? This shortens the development time and limits the number of similar scripts floating around.

If you didn't find any scripts that matched your needs, you need to get working on the script. In this case, you should consider from the start whether or not you want to distribute your script to others when it is done. Bram Moolenaar released Vim free...