Calmar's Vim Tips

• Vim Homepage
• Very good Tips from Bram Moolenaar about editing habits
• First to know: VI keybindings (sorted alphabetically)
• Additionally (very useful to know): Quick-Reference reference (or in Vim type :he quickref)
• Some efficient vim editing Tips
• Best Vim Tips by zzapper
• Programming / Scripting in Vim: usr_41
• Vim and Colors:

  On a 256 color xterm (or urxvt with the 256color patch), set TERM=xterm-256color e.g. in ~/.bashrc. Source it.

  Then may check your colors with this color-printer script (256 color output). May also just use: 'tput colors' for the number of supported colors).

  Set t_Co=256 in your .vimrc. Now may take a 256 capable colorscheme (inkpot.vim, mine, ...) and may additionally tweak it. (Lookup the numbers on this 'about' color-chart: xterm <-> rgb, or use 'tput' or however).

  Note: there are also other 256 color capable terminals like rxvt, konsole, screen, pterm...

  For a quick-update of your color-setup (while you tweak it), may use a mapping like:
  map <F8> :update<CR>:colorscheme colorconfig<CR>
  in your ~/.vimrc.

  My actual dark / light colorscheme (according sshots: dark / light).

  Gvim and Vim in comparison

• German: Nice Documentation on http://www.ostc.de-> vi(m).pdf   or here
• German: highly recommend Book: ISBN: 3-8266-1425-9
  may order here or at your local bookstore :)
  
• My .vimrc file
• Vi bindings in Bash
• Keybinding/mapping/Keyboard layout change for ms-windows users (2000/XP): ms-keyboard fix (esc to caps-lock e.g.) You just write there a key into the registry. You could later delete it again without any harm.
• Some other personal Vim Tips
• When you use another editor, you might want to check out this editing-test ;)

Vim finally

<rant>

After switching several times between vim and (x)emacs, I will use vim now as a great editing tool.

About vim and emacs:

1. VIM-bad (to solve so): always the need to hit the <ESC> which is ( on todays keyboards) FAR off located. Well there's a fine solution 'remap that ESC key' (see below). I think the ESC key was used in the past for vi because it was easy/comfortable to reach.
   
   
2. VIM-great: The 'modal' design. You have several modes, where you have a complete keyboard setup with fast/single or easy keybindings. Vim is extremely fast and ergonomic!! (after you learned that tool at least)
   
   
3. Emacs-good: then emacs has packages like 'gnus' , which are really good ones - own applications on that Lisp-OS (emacs). But mutt/abook and slrn (a gnus replacement) are great programs anyway - and much faster as well).
   
   
4. Emacs-bad: emacs does not really support the idea of Unix, 'for each task a own tool'. That itself is not bad, unless that idea makes some sense, and in my experience it really does! E.g. I would be happy enough to edit my code manually, then let them through a 'beautify-C/html..' tool  (e.g. on pure html files I like to use `:%!tidy -i -q -asxml', or GNU indent for C). There are also other tools, which can easily work on the text inside vim. E.g. on single clicks when you map key for them.
   
   
5. Emacs-bad: start-up of emacs. Actually I found a good solution to offer emacs a own `Workspace', and since it can also be used as a server, then it's almost ok. But it has anyway some disadvantages compared to when you can have multiple instances of an editor like vim (e.g. easy to navigate with the window manager or screen).

Remapping

Well, the biggest disadvantage of VIM (ESC far off located) is easy to solve :)

• it's easy to bind <ESC> e.g. to the Caps-lock key, with xmodmap or the xkeycaps utility or have a look at that vim Tip. Under M$Win you can setup a key for the registry.

</rant>

May send comments to: mac@calmar.ws, thanks!