VIM

Matthieu Choplin

VIM basics

The built in tutorial of Vim is very useful to know the basics. To launch it simply type the following in your terminal:

$vimtutor

It will launch some lessons with an approach 'learning by doing'.

Configuration

The ~/.vimrc file provides Vim's default configuration

vim memento

Simple vimrc

set textwidth=79  " lines longer than 79 columns will be broken
set shiftwidth=4  " operation >> indents 4 columns; << unindents 4 columns
set tabstop=4     " a hard TAB displays as 4 columns
set expandtab     " insert spaces when hitting TABs
set softtabstop=4 " insert/delete 4 spaces when hitting a TAB/BACKSPACE
set shiftround    " round indent to multiple of 'shiftwidth'
set autoindent    " align the new line indent with the previous line

Jump to function definition:

g + *

Highlight variable under cursor:

:autocmd CursorMoved * exe printf('match IncSearch /\V\<%s\>/', escape(expand('<cword>'), '/\'))

Move cursor to its last position:

The quickest way is to hit either:

''

(two apostrophes) or:

``

(two backticks). Note that the difference is that the backtick goes to the same location on the line, whereas the apostrophe goes to the start of the line. On a UK keyboard, the apostrophe is more accessible, so I tend to use that one. There are loads of useful marks like this, see :help mark-motions. For some other motions (not 2j I think), there's also the jump-list that lets you navigate back and forth among a number of motions. Ctrl-O and Ctrl-I do this navigation, but see :help jump-motions for more information.

Line numbers

To display line numbers along the left side of a window, type any one of the following command while using text editor:

:set number

Go to line

:42

where 42 is the number of line you want to go

Split the screen

:vsp

Paste from another application into vim

To avoid indentation issue:

:set paste