I love vim!
arsTechnica has a terrific post about the history of vim. Sadly I don’t get to code much these days…and I miss it, but it’s fun to have a nostalgic look occasionally.
Share Article → Here's another of those insanely handy vim tips. To indent an entire file, gg=G.
That's all there is to it.
gg goes to the top of the file.
= is the indent command, and
G goes to the end of the file.
Just to handy and cool for words.
Enjoy!
Programming, Tips, Vim 
Web Wanderings for Apr 18, 2011 to Apr 20, 2011:
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science | Mother Jones: Knowing is half way to a solution.
Wanderlust: GOOD traces the most famous trips in history: Too cool for words! Literary trips mapped. Awesome!
YouTube - It Gets Better: Apple Employees: Wonderful! Made my day.
From Me To You: cool pictures - fun distraction.
vim - textwidth=0 and wrapwidth=0 in .vimrc.local not being respected - Super User: How to turn off the wrapping in Mac vim Janus.
Daily Vim: Text Editor Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, and HOWTOs: Gotta have the daily vim tricks :-)
Using vim at home and work now. I’ve run across some key config settings to make life easier.
My use of vim at work and home are very different. At work, it’s more programmer based stuff, while at home the text I work with is longer and more writing oriented, blog posts, long form fiction, mostly text files using markdown for formatting.
I like the Janus build, but the wrapping is a bit awkward. I ran across this great fix by Siavash Ghorbani. Add the following to your .vimrc.local file:
"Disable the annoying auto line break
fu! local:disableBr()
set wrap
set linebreak
set nolist " list disables linebreak
set textwidth=0
set wrapmargin=0
set fo-=t
endfu
" Disable line breaks for all file types
:au BufNewFile,BufRead *.* call local:disableBr()
Simple fix, and it did the trick.
Lot of folks talking about vim lately. I really like the idea of a consistent, cross platform text editor, and I’m a vi person from way back. But I’m also very hooked on TextMate, and some of the great bundles, particularly the markdown and multimarkdown support. So:
And the real question is, can it do previews easily? I’d like to get that same multimarkdown function that I have in textmate working in vim. So far, I’ve not found a way to do live preview, but the truth is, if I really needed the live preview, I’d stick with a WYSIWYG type editor. The whole point of sticking to text and easy markdown formatting is to get away from the formatting distractions.
Checking the output isn’t complicated. I keep my text files in a dropbox folder (so I can access them on the iPad/iPhone with simplenote and notesy). With multimarkdown installed, just running the current file through the multimarkdown command outputs the file with an .html extension. Pass the current file to the command using the percent sign (%).
:! mmd %
Tag matching in Textmate is nice, but it does often get me into trouble. I often find myself removing the additions and making manual fixes.
To be honest, I haven’t missed it yet.
The janus package contains a bunch of very handy plugins. So check it out. It also includes a bunch of themes. I haven’t picked a favorite yet. Still experimenting.
Not sure if this will be needed. Textmate doesn’t have an autosave feature, but I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting cmd-s at any break. The standard Mac keyboard shortcuts work in MacVIM, but of course, so do the standard vim commands. So at any break, I now just hit esc-:w to save.
Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, moving around without the mouse doesn’t come much easier than the vi world. After installing, simply walk through the vimtutor tutorial and in no time, you’ll be flying all over documents making any needed changes or adjustments.
There are some great sites to check out. I would suggest starting with Daniel Fischer’s blog post, “A Starting Guide to VIM from Textmate.” He will get you setup with MacVIM and the great Janus build of plugins.
That’s it for now. I’ll post updates as I get a chance to write more.
Enjoy!