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)

Let's build a plugin

Let's try building a simple plugin; this way, we can learn by the example.

A common task you have to perform when working with code is commenting out chunks of code. Let's build a plugin that does just that. Let's (uninspiringly) name our plugin vim-commenter.

Plugin layout

Since the Vim 8 release, there's thankfully only one way of structuring your plugins (which is also compatible with major plugin managers, such as vim-plug, Vundle, or Pathogen). The plugins are expected to have the following directory structure:

  • autoload/ lets you lazy load bits of your plugin (more on that later)
  • colors/ color schemes
  • compiler/ (language-specific) compiler-related functionality
  • doc/ documentation...