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I recommend learning the basics. It's great being able to navigate around a file with the keyboard in ways other than arrow keys to move a line at a time. Stuff

I recommend learning the basics. It's great being able to navigate around a file with the keyboard in ways other than arrow keys to move a line at a time. Stuff like hitting "%" to move between matching parenthesis, { and } to move between paragraphs, etc. And if you do any kind of development, the automatic indentation (and < and > to indent and outdent ranges) are hugely useful. All of these are also things you can use in IDEs like VS Code with their vim modes. The stuff in this article is pretty neat but (even after using vim for about 20 years) most of it doesn't click for me as easily. Eg I don't use marks; I wouldn't think ahead to leave a mark or remember afterward which letter I used for it. Kudos to people who can gain productivity by using this stuff, but I'd need something other than an explanation of what the commands do to be effective with it. I do at least try to use the quickfix stuff; that's a pretty big productivity boost over manually going to the right file and line to fix an error spotted by my compiler.

dllthomas 6y ago
> I do at least try to use the quickfix stuff; that's a pretty big productivity boost over manually going to the right file and line to fix an error spotted by my compiler. I've mapped cnext and cprev to tab and shift-tab, to make it easy to bounce through things. Also, in my shell I have defined alias cbuf='vim - -c cbuffer!' which lets me do things like "make | cbuf" or "git grep -n foo | cbuf", which is great. Tangentially, all of this plays well with some things I've built out for dealing with diffs (https://github.com/dlthomas/diff-kit https://github.com/dlthomas/diff-kit) - dklocs will turn a unified diff into location-prefixed changed lines, dkcov will find the intersection of a diff and a coverage report (very useful for answering the question "how did I break that test?"), either of which can be piped right into cbuf.
- scottlamb 6y ago
  I like that mapping. Typing ":cnext" and ":cprev" is quite awkward. Next time I use vim's quickfix list I'll try tab + shift-tab. I've been using VS Code + its Vim plugin recently anyway because I wanted to try out rust-analyzer and couldn't get it to work well with vim. (iirc I tried both YouCompleteMe and coc.nvim. Despite the name, the latter on classic vim; I haven't tried neovim yet. I thought they were supposed to be async, but at least one of them made vim hang for a long time when opening a fresh project, which drove me nuts.) Neat idea also with the alias. Do you also have alias make='make 2>&1' or something? [edit: maybe make() { /path/to/make "$@" 2>&1 }] It doesn't work for me otherwise since compiler/make errors go to stderr (as they should).
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    > Do you also have alias make='make 2>&1' or something? Ah, no, I probably just did `make 2>&1 | cbuf`; haven't actually been on a project using make in a while.

dllthomas 6y ago

> I do at least try to use the quickfix stuff; that's a pretty big productivity boost over manually going to the right file and line to fix an error spotted by my compiler. I've mapped cnext and cprev to tab and shift-tab, to make it easy to bounce through things. Also, in my shell I have defined alias cbuf='vim - -c cbuffer!' which lets me do things like "make | cbuf" or "git grep -n foo | cbuf", which is great. Tangentially, all of this plays well with some things I've built out for dealing with diffs (https://github.com/dlthomas/diff-kit https://github.com/dlthomas/diff-kit) - dklocs will turn a unified diff into location-prefixed changed lines, dkcov will find the intersection of a diff and a coverage report (very useful for answering the question "how did I break that test?"), either of which can be piped right into cbuf.

scottlamb 6y ago
I like that mapping. Typing ":cnext" and ":cprev" is quite awkward. Next time I use vim's quickfix list I'll try tab + shift-tab. I've been using VS Code + its Vim plugin recently anyway because I wanted to try out rust-analyzer and couldn't get it to work well with vim. (iirc I tried both YouCompleteMe and coc.nvim. Despite the name, the latter on classic vim; I haven't tried neovim yet. I thought they were supposed to be async, but at least one of them made vim hang for a long time when opening a fresh project, which drove me nuts.) Neat idea also with the alias. Do you also have alias make='make 2>&1' or something? [edit: maybe make() { /path/to/make "$@" 2>&1 }] It doesn't work for me otherwise since compiler/make errors go to stderr (as they should).
- dllthomas 6y ago
  > Do you also have alias make='make 2>&1' or something? Ah, no, I probably just did `make 2>&1 | cbuf`; haven't actually been on a project using make in a while.