33 KiB
Please keep in mind that I just started writing this guide and new things get added every day. Things about to be added can be found here: issues. Thanks!
Basics
- Buffers, windows, tabs?
- Active, loaded, listed, named buffers?
- Mappings?
- Mapleader?
- Registers?
- Motions? Operators? Text objects?
- Autocmds?
- Quickfix and location lists?
- Colorschemes?
Usage
Tips
- Saner behavior of n and N
- Quickly move current line
- Quickly add empty lines
- Quickly edit your macros
- Quickly jump to header or source file
- Quickly change font size in GUI
- Change cursor style in insert mode
- Don't lose selection when shifting sidewards
Debugging
Miscellaneous
Quirks
List of colorschemes
List of plugins
- Alignment
- Code completion
- Commenters
- Delimiter
- Fuzzy finders
- Grep tools
- Navigation
- Statusline
- Taking notes
- Tmux
- Undo history
- Version control
- Misc
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.
Registers?
Registers are slots that save text. Copying text into a register is called yanking and extracing text from a register is called pasting.
Vim provides 10 types of registers:
Type | Character | Filled | Contains text from.. |
---|---|---|---|
Unnamed | " |
implicitly | Last yank or deletion. (d , c , s , x , y ) |
Numbered | 0 to 9 |
implicitly | Register 0 : Last yank. Registers 1 : Last deletion. Register 2 : Second last deletion. And so on. Think of registers 1 -9 as a read-only queue with 9 elements. |
Small delete | - |
implicitly | Last deletion that was less than one line. |
Named | a to z , A to Z |
explicitly | For your own use. If you yank to register a , you replace its text. If you yank to register A , you append to the text in register a . |
Read-only | : , . , % |
implicitly | Register : : Last command. Register . : Last inserted text. Register % : Current filename. |
Alternate buffer | # |
implicitly | Most of the time the previously visited buffer of the current window. See :h alternate-file |
Expression | = |
explicitly | Evaluation of the VimL expression that was yanked. E.g. do this in insert mode: <c-r>=5+5<cr> and "10" will be inserted in the buffer. |
Selection and Drop | + , * , ~ |
implicitly | * and + are the clipboard registers. Register ~ : From last drag'n'drop. |
Black hole | _ |
explicitly | Use this register if you don't want any other registers implicitly affected. E.g. "_dd deletes the current line without affecting registers " , 1 , + , * . |
Last search pattern | / |
implicitly | Last pattern used with / , ? , :global , etc. |
There are numerous exceptions when registers get implicitly filled, so be sure
to read :h registers
.
Yank with y
and paste with p
/P
.
Vim distinguishes between characterwise and linewise selections. See :h linewise
.
Example: linewise
yy
(or just Y
) yanks the current line, move the cursor somewhere else, use
p
to paste below the current line P
for pasting above it.
Example: charwise
Yank the first word with 0yw
, move somewhere else, paste after the cursor on
the current line with p
and before the cursor with P
.
Example: explicit naming of register
"aY
yanks the current line into register a
. Move to another line. "AY"
appends the current line to register a
.
I suggest playing around with with all these registers a bit and constantly
checking :reg
, so you can see what's actually happening.
Fun fact: In Emacs "yanking" stands for pasting (or reinserting previously killed text) not copying.
Motions? Operators? Text objects?
Motions move the cursor. You all know h
/j
/k
/l
. Or w
and b
. Even
/
is a motion. They also take a count. 2?the<cr>
jumps to the second last
occurence of "the".
See :h navigation
and everything below for all available motions.
Operators act on a region of text, e.g. d
, ~
, gU
, >
to name just a
few. They get used in two contexts, either in normal or visual mode. In normal
mode, operators come first followed by a motion, e.g. >j
. In visual mode,
operators simply act on the selection, e.g. Vjd
.
Like motions, operators take a count, e.g. 2gUw
makes the rest of the current
word and the next one uppercase. Since motions and operators take counts,
2gU2w
works just as well and executes gU2w
twice.
See :h operator
for all available operators.
Text objects act on the surrounding area, opposed to motions that act into one direction. Actually they work on objects, e.g. a whole word, a whole sentence, everything between parentheses, and so on.
Text objects can't be used to move the cursor in normal mode, because even the most-skilled cursors can't jump into two directions at the same time. It works in visual mode though, because then one side of the object is already selected and the cursor simply jumps to the other side.
Text objects start with either i
or a
followed by a character denoting the
object. With i
it only acts on the object itself, with a
on the object plus
trailing whitespace. E.g. diw
deletes the current word and ci(
changes
everything between parentheses.
Text objects don't take a count.
See :h text-objects
for all available text objects.
Autocmds?
On many occasions, Vim emits events. You hook into these events by using autocmds.
You wouldn't use Vim if there weren't autocmds. They're used all the time, even
if you don't even know it. Don't believe me? Check :au
, but don't let the
output overwhelm you. These are all the autocmds that are in effect right now!
See :h {event}
for a quick overview of all available events and :h autocmd-events-abc
for more details.
A typical example would be setting filetype-specific settings:
autocmd FileType ruby setlocal shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 comments-=:#
But how does a buffer even know that it contains Ruby code? Because another
autocmd detected it as that and set the filetype accordingly which again
triggered the FileType
event.
One of the first things everyone adds to his vimrc is filetype on
. This simply
means that filetype.vim
is read at startup which sets autocmds for almost all
filetypes under the sun.
If you're brave enough, have a look at it: :e $VIMRUNTIME/filetype.vim
. Search
for "Ruby" and you'll find that Vim simply uses the file extension .rb
to
detect Ruby files:
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.rb,*.rbw setf ruby
The BufNewFile
and BufRead
events in this case are hardcoded in the C
sources of Vim and get emitted everytime you open a file via :e
and similar
commands. Afterwards all the hundreds of filetypes from filetype.vim
are
tested for.
Putting it in a nutshell, Vim makes heavy use of events and autocmds but also exposes a clean interface to hook into that event-driven system for customization.
Quickfix and location lists?
Every time an action has to return a list of locations, quickfix or location lists can be used. In this case a location is a file, a line number and optionally a column.
Examples are compiler errors assembled in a quickfix list or matches of an external grep tool assembled in a location list.
The big advantage over just putting that stuff in an empty buffer is that you get a nice uniform interface for browsing the entries.
At all time there's only one quickfix list, but every window can has its own location list. Both type of lists feel the same, but use slightly different commands for navigation.
Most common commands:
Action | Quickfix | Location |
---|---|---|
open window | :copen |
:lopen |
close window | :cclose |
:lclose |
next entry | :cnext |
:lnext |
previous entry | :cprevious |
:lprevious |
first entry | :cfirst |
:lfirst |
last entry | :clast |
:llast |
See :cc
and everything below for all commands.
Example:
Let's use our good old friend grep
for searching the files in the current
directory recursively for a certain query and put the results in the quickfix
list.
:let &grepprg = 'grep -Rn $* .'
:grep! foo
<grep output - hit enter>
:copen
Assuming any files contained the string "foo", it should be shown now in the quickfix window.
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 environments 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 $10l
or 90|
work even after the end of the line.
See :h blockwise-examples
for more info. It might seem complicated at first,
but quickly becomes second nature.
If you want to get real fancy, have a look at multiple-cursors.
Tips
Saner behavior of n and N
The direction of n
and N
depends on whether /
or ?
was used for
searching forward or backward respectively. This is pretty confusing to me.
If you want n
to always search forward and N
backward, use this:
nnoremap <expr> n 'Nn'[v:searchforward]
nnoremap <expr> N 'nN'[v:searchforward]
Quickly move current line
Sometimes I need a quick way to move the current line above or below:
nnoremap [e :<c-u>execute 'move -1-'. v:count1<cr>
nnoremap ]e :<c-u>execute 'move +'. v:count1<cr>
These mappings also take a count, so 2]e
moves the current line 2 lines below.
Quickly add empty lines
This is surely no must-have, but I prefer the following mappings over
o<esc>
/O<esc>
:
nnoremap [<space> :put! =''<cr>
nnoremap ]<space> :put =''<cr>
Quickly edit your macros
This is a real gem! The mapping takes a register (or *
by default) and opens
it in the cmdline-window. Hit <cr>
when you're done editing for setting the
register.
I often use this to correct typos I did while recording a macro.
nnoremap <leader>m :<c-u><c-r>='let @'. v:register .' = '. string(getreg(v:register))<cr><c-f><left>
Use it like this <leader>m
or "q<leader>m
.
Quickly jump to header or source file
This technique can probably be applied to many filetypes. It sets file marks
(see :h marks
) when leaving a source or header file, so you can quickly jump
back to the last accessed one by using 'C
or 'H
(see :h 'A
).
autocmd BufLeave *.{c,cpp} mark C
autocmd BufLeave *.h mark H
NOTE: The info is saved in the viminfo file, so make sure that :set viminfo?
includes :h viminfo-'
.
Quickly change font size in GUI
I think this was taken from tpope's config:
command! Bigger :let &guifont = substitute(&guifont, '\d\+$', '\=submatch(0)+1', '')
command! Smaller :let &guifont = substitute(&guifont, '\d\+$', '\=submatch(0)-1', '')
Change cursor style in insert mode
I like to use a block cursor in normal mode and i-beam cursor in insert mode. Also when using tmux in the middle.
if empty($TMUX)
let &t_SI = "\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=1\x7"
let &t_EI = "\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=0\x7"
else
let &t_SI = "\<Esc>Ptmux;\<Esc>\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=1\x7\<Esc>\\"
let &t_EI = "\<Esc>Ptmux;\<Esc>\<Esc>]50;CursorShape=0\x7\<Esc>\\"
endif
This simply tells Vim to print a certain sequence of characters (escape sequence) when entering/leaving insert mode. The underlying terminal will process and evaluate it.
There's one drawback though: there are many terminal emulator implementations and not all use the same sequences for doing the same things. The sequences used above might not work with your implementation. Your implementation might not even support different cursor styles. Check the documentation.
The example above works with iTerm2.
Don't lose selection when shifting sidewards
If you select one or more lines, you can use <
and >
for shifting them
sidewards. Unfortunately you immediately lose the selection afterwards.
You can use gv
to reselect the last selection (see :h gv
), thus you can work
around it like this:
xnoremap < <gv
xnoremap > >gv
Now you can use >>>>>
on your visual selection without any problems.
NOTE: The same can be achieved using .
, which repeats the last change.
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:
Quirks
Newline used for NUL
NUL characters (\0
) in a file, are stored as newline (\n
) in memory and
displayed in a buffer as ^@
.
See man 7 ascii
and :h NL-used-for-Nul
for more information.
Bracketed paste (or why do I have to set 'paste' all the time?)
Bracketed paste mode allows terminal emulators to distinguish between typed text and pasted text.
Did you ever tried pasting code into Vim and afterwards everything seemed messed up?
This only happens if you paste via cmd+v
, shift-insert
, middle-click
etc.
because then you're just throwing text at the terminal emulator. Vim doesn't
know that you just pasted the text, it thinks you're an extremly fast typist.
Accordingly it tries to indent the lines and fails.
Obviously this is not an issue, if you paste using Vim's registers, e.g. "+p
,
because then Vim knows that you're actually pasting.
To workaround this, you have to :set paste
, so it gets pasted as-is. See :h 'paste'
and :h 'pastetoggle'
.
If you're fed up with toggling 'paste'
all the time, have a look at this fine
plugin that does it for you:
bracketed-paste.
Additional read from the same author as the plugin: here.
Neovim: Neovim tries to make all of this much more seemless and sets bracketed paste mode automatically if the terminal emulator supports it.
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
Commenters
Delimiter
Fuzzy finders
Grep tools
Navigation
Also see fuzzy finders.