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)

How to execute Vimscript

Vimscript is made up of commands you run in command-line mode, and really is just a sequence of Vim commands in a file. You can always execute Vimscript by running each command in command mode (the one you prefix with :), or by executing the file with commands using a :source command. Historically, Vim scripts have a .vim extension.

As you're following along with this section, you may want to create *.vim files to experiment in. You can execute the files by running this:

:source <filename>

A much shorter version of that is this:

:so %

Here, :so is a short version of :source, and % refers to the currently open file.

For example, I just created a variables.vim file to play around with Vim's variables. I could execute its contents with :so %:

Alternatively, I could run each command in command mode. For example, if I wanted to print the contents...