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Vim

Vim is a console-run text editor program.
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Thoughtbot Icon Thoughtbot

Profiling Vim

Chris Thorn writing for Thoughtbot:

Lately, I’ve noticed that opening Markdown files in Vim is slow. I don’t know exactly how slow, but slow enough that I notice a pause after opening the file before I can edit it. I’m not sure why or when it started, but it’s painful enough that I want to track down and alleviate it.

I, too, have felt this pain, which is one of the reasons I no longer use Vim as my full-time coding editor. I still use it enough for its sluggishness to bug me, but not quite enough to go chasing down why it’s sluggish. This article might change my calculus on that decision.

Omer Hamerman prodops.io

Make Vim your friend in 9 minutes (or less)

Clearly it takes years to truly master Vim, but it takes just 9 minutes, or less depending on the speed you read at, to hear someone else’s journey with Vim. Omer Hamerman shared the “why” and “how” of Vim — plus the recipe and resources he used to learn Vim.

How did I do it? After a few brutal fights, having my fallback IDE to run back to crying with the tail between my legs, I made a decision. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Got a nice small notebook I could carry around
  2. I bought the awesome Practical Vim by Drew Neil both in hardcover and for my iPad to read on the move
  3. Every night before going to bed, I read one tip — the book is very intelligently built like that for easy, slow studying…

Hillel Wayne hillelwayne.com

At least one Vim trick you might not know

I’ve been using Vim for eight years and am still discovering new things. This is usually seen as a Good Thing About Vim. In my head, though, it’s a failing of discoverability: I keep discovering new things because Vim makes it so hard to know what’s available.

Vim definitely has a discoverability problem, which is why posts like this one are so valuable and get shared around by people like us.

The Changelog The Changelog #340

All things text mode

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post “How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019” a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

Vim github.com

vim-zoom: Zoom in and out of vim panes

As an avid vim + tmux user, <prefix>-z is an essential tmux command to zoom the current pane for the times I want to see my editor or command output at its maximum size. The vim-zoom plugin brings this same concept directly into vim by adding a <C-W>m mapping that will zoom the current split to be full screen. Triggering the mapping again brings back the original pane layout, making this an effective tool when needing to focus on a specific split when necessary without losing your splits layout!

vim-zoom: Zoom in and out of vim panes

Vim matthias-endler.de

Ten years of Vim

Matthias Endler shares his Vim experience by looking back after using the venerable text editor for 10 years. Would he go back and learn it all over again?

On one side, I would say no. There’s a steep learning curve in Vim and seeing all those modern IDEs become better at understanding the user’s intent, editing text became way easier and faster in general.

On the other side, Vim is the fastest way for me to write down my thoughts and code. As a bonus, it runs on every machine and might well be around in decades to come. In contrast, I don’t know if the IntelliJ shortcuts will be relevant in ten years (note: if you read this in the future and ask yourself “What is IntelliJ?”, the answer might be no).

Definitely click through to read his takeways, too. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the JS Party panel went deep on Vim (by accident?) for the next episode.

Vim github.com

Play PacVim to learn Vim

Jamal Moon writes in the readme:

Vim is a great tool to write and edit code, but many people, including me, struggled with the steep learning curve. I did not find a fun, free way to learn about the vim commands in-depth, and thus, PacVim was born. Inspired by the classic, PacMan, PacVim is a game that’ll give anyone plenty of practice with the vim commands while being a ton of fun to play.

Download and build the game with macOS and Linux.

Play PacVim to learn Vim

Vim changelog.com/posts

vimux - Simple, extensible vim integration with tmux

You may recall Josh gushing about tslime on Episode 0.7.3. While tslime makes it easy to send input from Vim to a tmux session, Ben Mills wanted a bit more, so he created Vimux. Vimux gives you a tmux pane in which to execute commands, all without losing focus in vim.

screenshot

Commands can easily be set up in your .vimrc to do common tasks:

" Prompt for a command to run
map rp :PromptVimTmuxCommand

" Run last command executed by RunVimTmuxCommand
map rl :RunLastVimTmuxCommand

" Inspect runner pane
map ri :InspectVimTmuxRunner

" Close all other tmux panes in current window
map rx :CloseVimTmuxPanes

" Interrupt any command running in the runner pane
map rs :InterruptVimTmuxRunner

Check out Ben’s introductory blog post for background and how they’re using Vim and tmux at Braintree (which I highly recommend for payment processing by the way).

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