vim’s sweet moves
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time editing books for my company, Guru Labs. Because of this, I’ve come to really appreciate the power of vim, and some of it’s very intuitive functionality. Many of you probably have much more experience with vim than I do, but I’d like to share some of the cool things I’ve recently learned while using vim.
Most of these commands involve command mode. If you are unclear what command mode is, you can find the documentation at http://www.vim.org/. Anyway, here’s the command I like to use:
- :cd /path/to/where/my/files/reside – the :cd command allows you to change directory to somewhere more useful than where you currently are in the file tree. I find this useful when I am working on one project, then need to move away from that project to another one. I simply :cd /to/the/new/project/dir and then open the file from there.
- :e filename – this command will simply open the requested file (if it exists) right into vim. If you need to abandon unsaved changes on the previous file, use :e!.
- :pwd – this one may seem obvious to some, but did you know you can print your current vim working directory? Pretty neat I say.
These are some simple command to help you move about in vim. I am sure there are plenty more that you use, why not share them?
Cheers,
Clint
on December 24, 2006 at 2:13 pm
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[...] I recently posted about the power of Vim and we also learned about some of Vim’s Sweet Moves. Today I wanted to talk about a few more advanced actions within Vim that can make your life easier. What are they? Find and Replace. Something that we’ve all had to do at one time or another is use find and replace within a document. This is really easy within Vim. [...]