I’ve recently moved back to vim (actually MacVim) after a 5 year hiatus using TextMate. A big part of that move was inspired by Steve Losh’s recent post Coming Home to Vim which has a number of really great tips.
I’ve cribbed many of them and have my .vimrc / .vim dotfiles checked into a public bitbucket repo.
There have been some big changes in the last 5 years since I’ve been away from vim (or else I just didn’t know what the hell I was doing, which is also possible). The addition of pathogen for plugin management makes configuration much easier. All plugins are completely contained in their own directory. You can try something out and if it doesn’t work, just delete the plugin’s directory to uninstall it.
NerdTree is nice, but PeepOpen‘s integration with MacVim for finding/opening files beats TextMate’s cmd-T hands down.
I tend to be a hands-on, visual learner, so I looked around for a nice wallpaper to help me learn and retain the panoply of vim movement commands, but all I was able to find were simple lists of commands, so I decided to whip my own version up.
It shows all of the default movement commands, each command is placed relative to the center of the image and are ordered based on how far your cursor will likely travel. All of these are active in vim’s “normal” mode (though I believe most if not all of them will also work in “visual” mode.
I also find it useful to set my MacVim window to be slightly transparent so that I can see the shortcuts through the window if I need to. In MacVim 7.3 you need to turn on the Advanced->”Use experimental renderer” option. Then you can “:set transp=20″ to make it 20% transparent (which feels right to me, but you might want to move it up/down depending on your preferences).
You can download the full size (1900×1200) (or 2560×1600) image for yourself.
I’ve also got the original OmniGraffle file that I used to create it checked in to a BitBucket repo if anyone feels like remixing it or adding their own shortcuts or customizations to it.
Staring to compile a list: http://www.shortcut-a-day.com/category/vim/ definitely a work in progress though
Sweet wallpaper, love it!
Why the capital N in the upper right quarter says “next text”?
The “N” and the “n” are meant to be modifiers on the search terms, it’s a little subtle, but the word “text” is italicized and it’s meant to imply the same “text” as is used with the search functions (?, /) that they’re next to. You use it by searching using ? or / and then if the first match isn’t what you want, hit “n”/”N” to get to the next/previous instance of “text”
I understand how the searching works. What I mean, is, why the difference between upper and lower part. The lower part says upper-case N is for previous, whereas the same action in the upper part is specified as lower-case n for previous.
The same discrepancy is for searching next.
I’m using “next” to imply “down” and “previous” to imply “up”. If you do a forward search with “/”, “n” searches down, if you do a backwards search with “?”, “n” searches up.
[...] more movements also have a look at this Vim Movements Wallpaper. I won’t use it personally, but it makes for a handy [...]