3.7 KiB
Basics
Usage
Usage
Buffers, windows, tabs?
Vim is a text editor. Everytime text is shown, the text is part of a buffer. Each file will be opened in its own buffer. Plugins show stuff in their own buffers etc.
Buffers have many attributes, e.g. whether the text it contains is modifiable, or whether it is associated with a file and thus needs to be synchronized to disk on saving.
Windows are viewports onto buffers. If you want to view several files at the same time or even different locations of the same file, you use windows.
And please, please don't call them splits. You can split a window in two, but that doesn't make them splits.
Windows can be split vertically or horizontally and the heights and widths of existing windows can be altered, too. Therefore you can use whatever window layout you prefer.
A tab page (or just tab) is a collection of windows. Thus, if you want to use multiple window layouts, use tabs.
Putting it in a nutshell, if you start Vim without arguments, you'll have one tab page that holds one window that shows one buffer.
By the way, the buffer list is global and you can access any buffer from any tab.
Colorschemes?
Colorschemes are the way to style your Vim. Vim consists of many components and each of those can be customized with different colors for the foreground, background and a few other attributes like bold text etc. They can be set like this:
:highlight Normal ctermbg=1 guibg=red
This would paint the background of the editor red. See :h :highlight for more
information.
So, colorschemes are mostly a collection of :highlight commands.
Actually, most colorschemes are really 2 colorschemes! The example above sets
colors via ctermbg and guibg. The former definition will only be used if Vim
was started in a terminal emulator, e.g. xterm. The latter will be used in
graphical environements like gVim.
If you ever happen to use a certain colorscheme in Vim running in a terminal emulator and the colors don't look like the colors in the screenshot at all, chances are that the colorscheme only defined colors for the GUI.
Here's a list of commonly used colorschemes:
- base16
- gotham
- gruvbox
- jellybeans
- molokai
- railscasts
- solarized (or a lighter variant of it: flattened)
- vividchalk
I use gruvbox for the GUI and janah for the terminal.
Basics
Managing plugins
Pathogen was the first popular tool for
managing plugins. Actually it just adjusts the runtimepath (:h 'rtp') to
include all the things put under a certain directory. You have have to clone the
repositories of the plugins there yourself.
Real plugin managers expose commands that help you installing and updating plugins from within Vim. Hereinafter is a list of commonly used plugin managers in alphabetic sequence:
Plug is my favorite, but your mileage may vary.