Sharing Vim Tricks

Searching

That's probably a no brainer because everybody does it all the time, but searching in Vim is a pretty cool experience. Standard search is from normal mode by typing /searchword. To go to the next result use n. If you want to search in the reverse direction, use ? instead of /. If you want to continue the search with the last searchword, just use / or ?.

Sometimes you want to search for the word you are just having your cursor over. That's possible by using * in normal mode, which will search for that words forward, # searches for that word backwards.

When you use * you will notice in the status bar that Vim is wrapping the word in < and >. This marks beginning of word and end of word. That way if you search for <foo>, it will match foo but not foobar.

Replacing

Generally replacing works with the command :%s/search for/replace with/g. For replacing some weird rules exist which are worth knowing. First of all, the / can be replaced with pretty much everything else. If the slash is part of your searchword, you could also use :%s#search for#replace with#g. The second weird rule is that if you want to insert a newline, n won't do that, r does. For replacements n is actually the nullbyte! But don't worry, r inserts the correct newline sign that is currently in use for this document. The g means: “replace all matches in a line”. Without that, it would only replace the first occurrence of each line. This is a pretty obscure thing that this is not the default, but in some cases you might want to remove the /g. If you replace that way, Vim will do replacements for the searchword on each line in the file without asking. If you add a c to the flags, it will ask for confirmation for each match.

So far, so good. Now how would you search for the last searchword and replace this? Just leave out the last search: :%s//replace with/. This is especially useful when combined with *.

Another helpful thing is to only replace in a selection. That's very easy. Just select the lines you want with visual selection and then leave out the % sign when doing the replacement. The % just tells vim to operate on the whole document, not having anything there would mean just operating on the current line.

Ways to Insert

As programmer in most languages it makes a lot of sense to think in lines. Vim does that. The most common block selection operates on lines and so do searching and replacing. This line-based thinking also comes in handy when doing inserts. o inserts a new line, O creates a new line in front of the current one. In both cases you will end up in insert mode.

But there are cooler ways to insert too by using motion commands!

Motion Commands

Vim has a couple of motion commands. These need a bit of explanation but trust me, they are awesome. First the most common commands that support motion: y{motion} for copying into a register, c{motion} for deleting and stepping into insert mode, d{motion} for just deleting without going to the insert mode and of course v{motion} to select something.

Now what the hell is {motion}? Motion commands are commands that move the cursor. The probably most awesome motion command is iCHAR where CHAR is a special character to search for in both directions. There the extra rule applies that parentheses are properly inverted for you. This works for ", ', ( and others. Vim is clever enough to adhere to the escaping rules of the language you are working with. This for example means that the command ci" looks selects everything between the next two quotes, deletes the contents and goes to insert mode (c = change). If you want to have it selected instead, you can use vi". vi( will select everything between the current set of parentheses etc (v = visual selection).

The following other motion commands exist: b moves the cursor to the beginning of the word, e to the end. {count}j would go {count} lines down (j = jump I suppose). f{char} looks for a character on the right, F{char} to the left. t and T work like f and F but go one character more (before match, after match). Last but not least there is {count}w which moves {count} words.

Awesome File Navigation

There is a little undocumented (or badly documented feature) of Vim called autochdir. Some people warn about it because it might break plugins, but I never had any issues with it and I am using it for a long, long time. To enable it, you just have to add this to the vimrc: set autochdir.

When enabled, Vim will change into the folder of the file of the buffer. This is pretty handy because :e then works relative to the file. So for example if you are in foo/bar.py and want to edit foo/baz.py you only have to do :e baz.py. Thanks to the automatic completion with Tab and ^D this makes navigating in trees fun. If you have a file open already it will be put into a buffer. If you then substitute :e with :b it will only complete to files that were already open. Because this also supports partial matches, very often a :b baz is enough to go to the baz.py file.

Why The Hell is this not a Default?

There are a couple of things to add to the vimrc where I really wonder why this is not the default:

set title. When this is on your vimrc, the terminal title will automatically reflect what buffer you are working in. This also works in GUI mode, but there it just does nothing. This really should be the default.

Steal my Config

If you want my config, you can download it together with the rest of my dotfiles from this git repository: mitsuhiko/dotfiles.