Computers & Software

From time to time, you may come across the need to inspect the character under the cursor in Vim. For example, VimTricks reader Scott wrote in asking for help changing smart quotes in a file to regular quotes. Smart quotes or “curly quotes” are the special characters used by modern prose editors in place of

Vim’s expression register is a temporary register that can be used to run snippets of Vim script. We can use this for a variety of things, anytime we want to evaluate Vim script. One helpful use case for this is to perform math calculations right inside Vim, inserting the result into our document. That’s right,

Vim supports two kinds of splits: vertical (:vsplit) and horizontal (:split). You can open any file in a split by calling :split path/to/file or :vsplit path/to/file. By default, the full width or height of the current buffer will be divided in two. The new split will take up 50% of the available real estate, and

Have you ever tried to quit Vim with :q only to have a small window appear, showing you the last few commands you typed? You accidentally opened the Vim command line window. It happened because the command line window is opened with q:, and you made a common transposition mistake. Aside from giving you a

Vim file templates are useful for starting new files with boilerplate code. There are plenty of snippet and templating plugins for Vim, but you can create file templates without any plugins using a concept Vim calls skeleton files. This allows you to automatically populate a new file with a given template. Learn about it with

Here are 50 useful Vim commands that work in normal mode. Many of these can be combined and modified to produce dozens more. Use these as inspiration for your own repeatable workflows. In no particular order: gg Move to the first line of the file G Move to the last line gg=G Reindent the whole

Did you know you can open a URL in Vim directly from the command line? That’s right, you can simply call vim https://some/path and you’ll instantly be able to view and edit the results in Vim. When you open a URL in Vim this way, it uses native functionality that is provided by the netrw