Working with Vim, Part 2: Plugins, Tips and Tricks

Presented at Still Hacking Anyway (SHA2017), Aug. 6, 2017, 9 a.m. (60 minutes).

If you know how to use Vim well enough to do some changes here and there, but not well enough to use as your primary text editor, this workshop is for you. Learn how to use Vim <strong>efficiently</strong>, how to customize it to fit your own brain, how to leverage powerful plugins that reduce annoying tasks to a few keystrokes. Even when you know some of the basics of using Vim, it can be hard to promote it to your main editor. A lot of tasks might seem harder to you, much harder than just grabbing a mouse and clicking around some menus. It can feel like you're struggling to do something that would be so much easier in a "modern" editor. This is a pretty common wall, and I'd like to help you go through it. Vim is a 25-year-old text editor that still has many, many features that "modern" editors lack. It's incredibly customizable, and has thousands of plugins you can use to improve your workflow. With the right tools and tweaks, it's an editor that will fit your hands like a well-tailored glove. This workshop can't give you the exact workflow you need, but it can give you the tools to find it. I'll show you ways to solve common problems, both with the built-in mappings, and with plugins. I'll demonstrate some of the scripts and plugins I've created to fix my own workflow inefficiencies. I'll answer any questions you have, so be sure to prepare some! And consider visiting Part 3 of this series of workshops, where we'll do some actual programming and build a Vim plugin ourselves.

Presenters:

  • Andrew Radev
    Web developer (Rails, Ember.js), sworn Vimmer. Professionally, I code mostly in Ruby, Rails, and a bit of Ember.js. In my spare time (and very non-professionally), I try to play around with all sorts of other stuff: Image processing, gamedev with Unity, opengl and webgl, Android, electronics, and any fun programming-related thing that crosses my path. I'm a dedicated Vim user and I've created a bunch of Vim plugins. I maintain the VimLinks twitter account, I'm one of the maintainers of the official ruby bindings for vim (but I'm pretty bad at keeping up with the work there), and I own the runtime files for Vim's eco support.

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