Book Image

Mastering Vim

By : Ruslan Osipov
Book Image

Mastering Vim

By: Ruslan Osipov

Overview of this book

Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript. By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Seven habits of effective text editing

This section is a condensed version of Bram Moolenaar's article from 2000, and a subsequent presentation from 2007. It's rather good, give it a read on Bram's website: https://moolenaar.net/habits.html. In case you decide to skip reading the whole thing, here follows a very high-level summary.

Since developers spend so much time reading and editing code, Bram highlights an important cycle when it comes to improving your text-editing experience:

  1. Detect inefficiency
  2. Find a quicker way
  3. Make it a habit

Those three steps are augmented with numerous examples. Here's one of the examples for each:

  1. Detect inefficiency: Moving around takes a lot of time.
  2. Find a quicker way: Often, you're looking for something that's already there. You can search for a piece of text to move faster. Or you can take a step or two further...