My notes on vim

One of the things that have been on my todo list forever — learn vim! And what better time is there for such a thing than a holiday !

What is vim? Only the most awesome text editor in the world! It can run in terminal, so you can use it wherever you want, Gnome, KDE, anything. It has so many capabilities and great features, that will make your life easier. The only downside is that it requires some getting used to … yeah, right .

If you’re starting with vim as well, one of the first areas to explore is configuration. Vim loads settings from .vimrc file that is stored in your home directory. There is a fair amount of things that can be configured. And with right configuration vim is godlike text editor!

Here is mine .vimrc file:

" astro .vimrc
set nocompatible
set showmode
set showcmd
set title
set number
set mouse=a
set backspace=2
set showmatch
set autoindent

syntax on

Make vim work with system clipboard

Very important thing (at least for me) is to be able easily copy and paste text outside the editor. In the console environment, the classic CTRL+[CVX] shortcuts doesn’t work very well. Even if they did, the work would be confusing, because vim has its own commands for copy and paste. Those unfortunately don’t work with the “outside world” — the X11. But it’s possible to make them work, so let’s have a look .

In order to make it work in terminal, vim has to be compiled with X11 clipboard support. This is indicated by +xterm_clipboard string in vim’s version. To check if the clipboard support is present in your version, try this command:

$ vim --version | grep "\+xterm_clipboard"

On ubuntu and debian-like distros vim comes compiled with this feature, but on RHEL/Fedora/SUSE without. If you are running Redhat/Fedora/CentOS, you can install the vim-X11 package (if you have gvim then this is already installed). This provides the vimx command, which is a console version of Vim with X11-clipboard support. Good idea is making an alias vim to vimx by adding this line to your .bashrc:

if [ -e /usr/bin/vimx ];
then
  alias vim='/usr/bin/vimx';
fi

All you need to do after that is add this line to your .vimrc:

set clipboard=unnamedplus

And you’re good . Now you can easily copy and paste from clipboard using standard commands (y, d and p).

Detailed description of what’s going on is here.

Unhighlight text after search

How to remove the highlight of last searched phrase? Try this:

:noh

Sources

• Vim cheatsheet

To be continued …