Hacking VIM : a cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor ; from personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users

From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users * Create, install, and use Vim scripts * Personalize your work-area * Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive **In Detail** Each chapter of this book 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. Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more. **What you will learn from this book?** **Chapter 1 introduces Vim and a few well-known relatives; their history and relation to vi is briefly described. **Chapter 2 introduces how to make Vim a better editor for you by modifying it for your personal needs. It shows us ways of modifying fonts, the color scheme, the status line, menus, and toolbar. **Chapter 3 introduces some of the ways in which Vim helps us to navigate through files easily. It explains an alternative way for boosting navigation through files and buffers in Vim. **Chapter 4 introduces you to features in Vim. It describes how to use templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers. **Chapter 5 introduces simple tricks to format text and code. It also discusses how external tools can be used to give Vim just that extra edge it needs to be the perfect editor. **Chapter 6 is especially for those who want to learn how to extend Vim with scripts. The chapter introduces scripting basics, how to use and install/uninstall scripts, debugging scripts, and lots more. **Appendix A has a listing of games that have been implemented with Vim scripting; it also provides an overview of chat and mail scripts and has a section on using Vim as an IDE. **Appendix B shows how to keep your Vim configuration files well organized and how to retain your Vim configuration across computers by storing a copy of it online. **Approach** This is a cookbook packed with ready-to-use hacks that give solutions for some of the commonest problems users of the Vim editor encounter during their daily use. Each recipe follows a systematic approach with a self-contained description of the task it covers, how to use it, and what you gain by using it. The reader can read any of the hacks in this book without having to read any of the other hacks-where necessary they include cross-references to other relevant hacks. The minimum version of Vim required for each hack is clearly indicated. **Who this book is written for?** Anyone who has worked with Vim and wants to get more out of this legendary text editor can use the hacks from this book. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users.****************

In Detail

Each chapter of this book 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.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

This book contains hacks that cover everything from personalizing Vim according to the user's work cycle to optimizations that will boost the user's productivity. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for experienced Vim users. It is written for Vim 7.0 , the latest stable version.

Approach

This is a cookbook packed with ready-to-use hacks that give solutions for some of the commonest problems users of the Vim editor encounter during their daily use. Each recipe follows a systematic approach with a self-contained description of the task it covers, how to use it, and what you gain by using it. The reader can read any of the hacks in this book without having to read any of the other hacks, where necessary they include cross-references to other relevant hacks. The minimum version of Vim required for each hack is clearly indicated.

Who this book is for

It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users.

Hacking Vim by Kim Schulz, a book truly suited for the average Vim user looking to find his or her way into the advanced and wonderful world of Vim. From basic customization to fully advanced scripting, this book has it all. To begin the book shows you what I consider to be the most important part of Vim, making it pretty! Of course in the process it also outlines a number of useful tips in order to increase usability and productivity. The book also devotes what seems like a small chapter on GVim, Vim's GUI counterpart, and some of the more advanced menu options it has available. Although this chapter didn't appeal to me directly it wasn't so intrusive that it actually got in the way, just skip a few pages and we're back to hacking the core of Vim again. The book continues by showing you a better way to navigate Vim, faster searching, multiple files. It introduces you to the tabbing features of Vim and how to use them effectively. From this point the book takes a bit of a turn and begins to focus more so on using Vim while in a programming environment, specifically C/C++. Many of the tips given could be easily applied to other languages, Perl, Ruby, etc., however specific examples do not exist which at times can make some of the concepts being taught a little tricker to follow. The final chapter of the book goes into the Vim scripting language and the power and versatility it has. In fact the final chapter could be expanded into a new book and still only begin to scratch the surface. Luckily, just like Hacking Vim itself the scripting chapter starts off by showing you how to set up your scripting environment effectively and then moves you through the syntax of the language. The book finishes on a high note by showing a handful of "useless" yet important Vim scripted games that show the full capabilities of the Vim scripting language. All in all this book showed me the parts of Vim that I had only previously heard about but never understood. This book has showed me a number of improvements for my own .vimrc as well as how to use Vim effectively when handling any task. In fact this very review was written in Vim, something I never would have done before reading this book, spell checking and all. This book contains hacks that cover everything from personalizing Vim according to the user's work cycle to optimizations that will boost the user's productivity. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for experienced Vim users. It is written for Vim 7.0, the latest stable version. Anyone who has worked with Vim and wants to get more out of this legendary text editor can use the hacks from this book. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users