18 KiB
Basics
Usage
Debugging
Miscellaneous
List of colorschemes
List of plugins
- Alignment
- Code completion
- Delimiter
- Fuzzy finders
- Grep tools
- Navigation
- Statusline
- Taking notes
- Undo history
- Version control
Basics
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.
Active, loaded, listed, named buffers?
Run Vim like this vim file1. The file's content will be loaded into a buffer.
You have a loaded buffer now. The content of the buffer is only synchronized
to disk (written back to the file) if you save it within Vim.
Since the buffer is also shown in a window, it's also an active buffer. Now
if you load another file via :e file2, file1 will become a hidden buffer
and file2 the active one.
Both buffers are also listed, thus they will get listed in the output of
:ls. Plugin buffers or help buffers are often marked as unlisted, since
they're not regular files you usually edit with a text editor. Listed and
unlisted buffers can be shown via :ls!.
Unnamed buffers, also often used by plugins, are buffers that don't have an
associated filename. E.g. :enew will create an unnamed scratch buffer. Add
some text and write it to disk via :w /tmp/foo, and it will become a named
buffer.
Mappings?
You can define your own mappings with the :map family of commands. Each
command of that family defines a mappping for a certain set of modes.
Technically Vim comes with a whopping 12 modes, 6 of them can be mapped.
| Command | Modes |
|---|---|
:map |
normal, visual, operator-pending |
:nmap |
normal |
:xmap |
visual |
:cmap |
command-line |
:omap |
operator-pending |
:imap |
insert |
E.g. this defines the mapping for normal mode only:
:nmap <space> :echo "foo"<cr>
So far, so good. There's only one problem that can be pretty confusing to beginners: All the commands listed above are recursive. That is, the right-hand side takes other mappings into account.
So you defined a mapping that simply echoes "Foo":
:nmap b :echo "Foo"<cr>
But what if you want to map the default behavior of b (going one word back) to
another key?
:nmap a b
If you hit a, we expect the cursor to go back a word, but instead
"Foo" is printed in the command-line! Because the right-hand side, b, was
mapped to another action already, namely :echo "Foo"<cr>.
The proper way to resolve this problem is to use a non-recursive mapping
instead. Take the commands from above and put a nore in front of the map, so
:noremap, :nnoremap, :xnoremap, :cnoremap, :onoremap, :inoremap.
Putting it in a nutshell, this solves our problem:
:nnoremap a b
Mapleader?
The mapleader is simply a placeholder than can be used with custom mappings and
is set to \ by default.
nnoremap <leader>h :helpgrep<right>
This mapping is triggered by \h.
You can change the mapleader like this:
let mapleader = ';'
Note: It's important that the mapleader is set before the mappings that use
it, otherwise \ will be used anyway.
Opposed to the global <leader>, there's is also <localleader> which is
supposed to be used in filetype-specific plugins. There is no default set for
the local mapleader.
See :h mapleader and :h maplocalleader for more.
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.
I use gruvbox for the GUI and janah for the terminal.
More colorschemes: here
Usage
Getting help offline
Vim comes with great documentation in the form of single text files with a special layout. Vim uses a system based on tags for accessing certain parts of those help files.
First of all, read this: :help :help. This will open the file
$VIMRUNTIME/doc/helphelp.txt in a new window and jump to the :help tag
within that file.
A few simple rules:
- options are enclosed in single quotes, e.g.
:h 'textwidth' - VimL functions end in (), e.g.
:h reverse() - commands start with :, e.g.
:h :echo
You can use <c-d> (this is ctrl+d) to list all tags that
match the currently entered query. E.g. :h tab<c-d> will get you a list of all
tags from tab over 'softtabstop' to setting-guitablabel.
You want to list all VimL functions? Simple: :h ()<c-d>. You want to list all
VimL functions that concern windows? :h win*()<c-d>.
This quickly becomes second nature, but especially in the beginning, you
sometimes don't know any part of the tag you are looking for. You can only
imagine some keywords that could be involved. :helpgrep to the rescue!
:helpgrep backwards
This will look for "backwards" in all documentation files and jump to the first
match. The matches will be assembled in the quickfix list. Use :cn/:cp to
jump to the next/previous match. Or use :copen to open the quickfix window,
navigate to an entry and hit <cr> to jump to that match. See :h quickfix for
the whole truth.
Getting help online
If you have an issue you can't resolve or are in need of general guidance, see
the vim_use mailing list.
Another great resource is using
IRC. The channel #vim on
Freenode is huge and usually full of helpful people.
If you want to report a Vim bug, use the vim_dev mailing list.
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.
Block insert
This is a technique to insert the same text on multiple consecutive lines at the same time. See this demo.
Switch to visual block mode with <c-v>. Afterwards go down for a few lines.
Hit I or A and start entering your text.
It might be a bit confusing at first, but text is always entered for the current line and only after finishing the current insertion, the same text will be applied to all other lines of the prior visual selection.
So a simple example is <c-v>3jItext<esc>.
If you have lines of different length and want to append the same text right
after the end of each line, do this: <c-v>3j$Atext<esc>.
Sometime you need to place the cursor somewhere after the end of the current
line. You can't do that by default, but you can set the virtualedit option:
set virtualedit=all
Afterwards $10l or 90| work even after the end of the line.
See :h blockwise-examples for more info. It might seem complicated at first,
but quickly becomes second nature.
If you want to get real fancy, have a look at multiple-cursors.
Debugging
General tips
If you encounter a strange behaviour, try reproducing it like this:
vim -u NONE -N
This will start Vim without vimrc (thus default settings) and in nocompatible
mode (which makes it use Vim defaults instead of vi defaults). (See :h --noplugin for other combinations of what to load at start.)
If you can still reproduce it now, it's most likeley a bug in Vim itself! Report it to the vim_dev mailing list. Most of the time the issue won't be resolved at this time and you'll have to further investigate.
Often plugin updates introduce new/changed/faulty behaviour. If you're using a plugin manager, comment them out until you find the culprit.
Issue is still not resolved? If it's not a plugin, it must be your other settings, so maybe your options or autocmds etc.
Time to use binary search. Repeatedly split the search space in two until you find the culprit line. Due to the nature of binary division, it won't take many steps.
In practice it works like this: Put the :finish command in the middle of your
vimrc. Vim will skip everything after it. If it still happens, the problem is in
the active upper half. Move the :finish to the middle of that half.
Otherwise the issue is in the inactive lower half. Move the :finish to the
middle of that half. And so on.
Profiling startup time
Vim startup feels slow? Time to crunch some numbers:
vim --startuptime /tmp/startup.log +q && vim /tmp/startup.log
The first column is the most important as it shows the elapsed absolute time. If there is a big jump in time between two lines, the second line is either a very big file or a file with faulty VimL code that is worth investigating.
Profiling at runtime
Vim provides a built-in capability for profiling at runtime and is a great way to find slow code in your environment.
First and foremost, check if :version shows +profile, which means that the
profile feature is enabled. Otherwise you're using a Vim with a smaller
feature set. You want a Vim built with the huge feature set (see :h :version). Many distros install a Vim with minimal feature set by default, so
you need to install a package called vim-x11 or vim-gtk (yes, even if you
don't use gvim) for more features.
With that said, we're ready for profiling now. The :profile command takes a
bunch of sub-commands for specifying what to profile.
If you want to profile everything, do this:
:profile start /tmp/profile.log
:profile file *
:profile func *
<do something in Vim>
<quit Vim>
Vim keeps the profiling information in memory and only writes it out to the
logfile on exit. (Neovim has fixed this using :profile dump).
Have a look at /tmp/profile.log. All code that was executed during profiling
will be shown. Every line, how often it was executed and how much time it took.
Most of the time that will be plugin code the user isn't familiar with, but if
you're investigating a certain issue, jump to the bottom of the log. Here are
two different sections FUNCTIONS SORTED ON TOTAL TIME and FUNCTIONS SORTED ON SELF TIME that are worth gold. On a quick glance you can see, if a certain
function is taking too long.
Miscellaneous
Vim distributions
Vim distributions are Vim + custom settings + custom plugins from certain authors and are therefore very opinionated.
The problems with such distributions is that they tend to be used by beginners. (More advanced users know how to choose their own plugins and settings after all.) It all goes good until an issue appears. Now where is the problem? The beginner doesn't know what to do and asks for advice on the internet. After long back and forth they figure out that the problem was a weird mapping provided by the distro. But the beginner thought it was a default Vim mapping... Time was wasted, everyone is pissed.
I don't have problems with distributions per se, but please, if you don't understand exactly what they're doing, don't try to get help from others in case of emergencies.
I know that many people don't want to spend hours and hours on customizing an editor (and actually you never stop customizing your vimrc when you finally got hooked), but in the long-term it's much better and more time-efficient to learn how to do stuff manually in the first place.
Repeat after me: "A programmer should know his tools."
Anyway, if you know what you're doing, you might get some inspiration from looking at some distributions:
List of colorschemes
Here's a list of commonly used colorschemes:
- base16
- gotham
- gruvbox
- janah
- jellybeans
- lucius
- molokai
- railscasts
- seoul256
- solarized (or a lighter variant: flattened)
- tomorrow
- vividchalk
List of plugins
Alignment
Code completion
Delimiter
Fuzzy finders
Grep tools
Navigation
Also see fuzzy finders.