romainl

FOREWORDS

I don't mean the snippet at the bottom of this gist to be a generic plug-n-play solution to your search needs. It is very likely to not work for you or even break things, and it certainly is not as extensively tested and genericised as your regular third-party plugin.

My goal, here and in most of my posts, is to show how Vim's features can be leveraged to build your own high-level, low-maintenance, workflows without systematically jumping on the plugins bandwagon or twisting Vim's arm.

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Instant grep + quickfix

romainl

Don't use Vim

Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.

-- Anthony Vincenzo "Tony" Baretta

Vim is an amazing text editor. I love it. Really, I wouldn't [organize][organize] a Vim advent calendar if I didn't. But, as amazing as it is, Vim is not for everyone. It can't solve all your problems, or be a TUI version of your favorite IDE, or make you a better programmer, or land you that dream job in the Bay Area. But Vim can help you be more mindful, focused, and efficient, as long as you approach it with the right mindset.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly welcome you to try Vim, but I'm not a proselyte. I don't thrive on newbies. I just want you to use the right tool for the job and not waste your—and anyone's—time on a fruitless quest.

romainl

My Vim-related gists

Long-form

• How to use Tim Pope's Pathogen
• Idiomatic vimrc (superseded by idiomatic-vimrc)
• Clipboard sharing on Mac OS X is easy
• Apprentice — The Making Of
• Vim: pushing built-in features beyond their limits
• The right way to override any highlighting if you don't want to edit the colorscheme file directly

romainl

Linting your code, the vanilla way

You may want a linter plugin to lint your code in Vim but you probably don't need it. At least try the built-in way before jumping on the plugin bandwagon.

Defining makeprg

autocmd FileType <filetype> setlocal makeprg=<external command>

This autocommand tells Vim to use <external command> when invoking :make % in a <filetype> buffer. You can add as many similar lines as needed for other languages.

romainl

Off the beaten path

What is &path used for?

Vim uses :help 'path' to define the root directories from where to search non-recursively for files.

It is used for:

• gf, gF, <C-w>f, <C-w>F, <C-w>gf, <C-w>gF,
• :find, :sfind, :tabfind,

romainl

The right way to override any highlighting if you don't want to edit the colorscheme file directly

Generalities first

Suppose you have weird taste and you absolutely want:

• your visual selection to always have a green background and black foreground,
• your active statusline to always have a white background and red foreground,
• your very own deep blue background.

romainl

Poor man's Surround

The following shows how to replicate some of Surround's features if you don't happen to have it installed.

NOTE: We only dealt with the simplest cases, here, and the convoluted nature of some of these commands shows how well designed and useful that plugin is. And let's not talk about all the corner cases it handles.

Install it, it's worth it.

The list

romainl

Redirect the output of a Vim or external command into a scratch buffer

Usage (any shell)

Show full output of command :hi in scratch window:

:Redir hi

Show full output of command :!ls -al in scratch window:

romainl

How to use Tim Pope’s Pathogen

I’ll assume you are on Linux or Mac OSX. For Windows, replace ~/.vim/ with $HOME\vimfiles\ and forward slashes with backward slashes.

The idea

Vim plugins can be single scripts or collections of specialized scripts that you are supposed to put in “standard” locations under your ~/.vim/ directory. Syntax scripts go into ~/.vim/syntax/, plugin scripts go into ~/.vim/plugin, documentation goes into ~/.vim/doc/ and so on. That design can lead to a messy config where it quickly becomes hard to manage your plugins.

This is not the place to explain the technicalities behind Pathogen but the basic concept is quite straightforward: each plugin lives in its own directory under ~/.vim/bundle/, where each directory simulates the standard structure of your ~/.vim/ directory.

romainl