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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the :substitute command and macros—two powerful tools we can use for refactoring.

We covered the :substitute command and its flags. We looked into arglist, which is a way to execute a command across multiple files.

The :substitute command also supports regular expressions, which make your life a lot easier by allowing you to go beyond literal matches. We covered the basics of regular expressions and Vim magic modes (which are ways of interpreting special characters when parsing regex-enabled strings).

Finally, we looked at macros: a feature that lets you record and later replay a set of keystrokes. Macros can be edited the same way that registers can, and can also be made recursive to play as many times as needed.

In the next chapter, we'll cover customizing Vim for a personalized editing experience.

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