Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper

2010/10/4

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.

Vim Shortcuts Wallpaper

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.

There are 49 comments in this article:

  1. 2010/10/4Tweets that mention Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper - Ted Naleid -- Topsy.com say:

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ted Naleid, lucastex_grails. lucastex_grails said: #Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper http://goo.gl/fb/I4gon #uncategorized #commandline #osx #shortcut [...]

  2. 2010/10/5Hamlet D'Arcy say:

    This is a brilliant idea!

  3. 2010/10/5Rys say:

    This is great! Is there any chance of a 2560×1600 version? I don’t have OmniGraffle to rerender and upscaling loses quality.

  4. 2010/10/5tednaleid say:

    @Hamlet thanks!

    @Rys sure, a new 2560×1600 one is linked above.

  5. 2010/10/5Link dump for October 5th | The Queue Blog say:

    [...] Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper – Ted Naleid – nice 1900×1200 wallpaper with vim movement shortcuts [...]

  6. 2010/10/5Random Links #277 | YASDW - yet another software developer weblog say:

    [...] Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper Available in two resolutions up to 2560×1600 [...]

  7. 2010/10/6Rys say:

    Excellent, thank you very much!

  8. 2010/10/6Steve Howarth say:

    Ted – Really Nice work! Very elegant.
    Would it be possible to to have a version with a transparent background so I can add my own colour to it.

    I tend to have a terminal embedded onto my desktop and the green makes reading my terminal tricky.

    Whilst I’ve been using Vim for quite a while now, I find things like this really useful for those ‘blank mind’ moments,

    Keep it up

    :wq

  9. 2010/10/6yehchge say:

    Good~~

  10. 2010/10/6tednaleid say:

    @Steve Howarth sure, here’s a version of the 2560×1600 wallpaper with a transparent background. The text is still white, so you’ll need something darker behind it. (or you could bring it into gimp/photoshop and add a black background to it).

  11. 2010/10/7Steve Howarth say:

    @tednaleid : Sir, you are a gent. Thanks for taking the time to do this, greatly appreciated!

  12. 2010/10/7greg say:

    Looks great ! I would have centered the command «zz» thant centers the screen on your cursor position (very handy).

    In Vim we trust !

  13. 2010/10/9Emacs Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper « Punch Card say:

    [...] Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper 9 10 2010 Stumbling across the Vim Movements Shortcuts Wallpaper, I decided to make one for Emacs. Basically I really like the [...]

  14. 2010/10/13Erez say:

    So simple, yet so brilliant. Great work.

  15. 2010/10/18Ralph Thompson say:

    great post thanks

  16. 2010/11/30jaux say:

    It is pretty, never seen a prettier one than this for vim. Thank you very much, Ted!

  17. 2010/12/8Paul Carey say:

    Great concept, love it. Many thanks.

  18. 2010/12/22Rich Internet Applications (RIA) » Blog Archive » Beginner Bash: Must-Know Bash Commands say:

    [...] Some people love vi. I don’t. If you’re convinced you must learn it, then check out Ted’s wallpaper and the keyboard [...]

  19. 2010/12/30Ubuntu/Linux Wallpaper: Vim, Grid und Simple « Ubuntu Linux Blog say:

    [...] Terminal leicht transparent ist. Entweder wie hier in der Auflösung 1900×1200 oder auf der Ursprungsseite auch in 2560×1600 [...]

  20. 2011/01/17What is the best Vim cheat sheet? - Quora say:

    [...] came across Ted Naleid's great Vim movement shortcuts wallpaper, which is spatial and lovely:http://naleid.com/blog/2010/10/0…Insert a dynamic date hereView All 0 CommentsCannot add comment at this [...]

  21. 2011/02/8Stephen Johnson say:

    This is amazing! Thank you!

  22. 2011/02/12hcabbos say:

    Very much appreciated! This will come in very handy.

  23. 2011/02/22Tom Purl say:

    Fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

  24. 2011/03/25Of code and color » Beginning Vim say:

    [...] And if you want to setup your workspace for learning, you can use the Vim movement shortcuts wallpaper. [...]

  25. 2011/03/31Vim 相關網頁資訊 | Input and Output say:

    [...] 這是另外一張Vim海報，比較傾向以移動方向為主。 This entry was posted in Linux and tagged Vim. Bookmark the permalink. ← Nook Color紀錄 [...]

  26. 2011/04/13Advanced text editor - Page 2 say:

    [...] and so on, my bookmarks go on forever… shortcuts wallpaper http://naleid.com/blog/2010/10/04/vi…uts-wallpaper/ just for the fun of it: [...]

  27. 2011/08/30Jeroen Leenarts say:

    Was wondering how you keep those .vimrc and .vim files up to date.

    Git obviously, but do you have a repo at the root of your home directory. I’m guessing not. So how have you got this configured?

    Just being curious. :)

  28. 2011/08/30Jeroen Leenarts say:

    I meant Mercurial… ahum…. (Not here for a hg vs. git slugfest. ;) )

  29. 2011/08/30tednaleid say:

    @Jeroen heh, I use both mercurial and git, but most of my personal stuff is in mercurial repos.

    I do have my vim files in a shared repo on bitbucket.

    To keep things up to date, I’ve created a shell script that has an updateRepo method in it that automatically downloads any missing plugins (or updates existing ones) into the pathogen bundle directory.

    Whenever I want to refresh my plugins, I just run the script again. If I add a new plugin that I want in all of my vim installations, I just add a line into that script to let the script know where the git or hg repo for that script is. (I don’t use any vimball plugins currently)

  30. 2011/09/8David say:

    I made myself an HTML version of your cheatsheet, that I use with NerdTool, so I could tweak the formatting without dealing with omnigraffle. It is here:

    https://gist.github.com/1204592

    A screenshot is here:

    http://minus.com/mjZtlZUmR

  31. 2011/09/9tednaleid say:

    That looks great David, thanks for posting it. For people using stuff like NerdTool, that’s easier to overlay other wallpapers instead of using the transparent png version that I had above.

  32. 2011/10/11David Stewart Zink say:

    You left out `backquote`; ‘single-quote’ sends you to the beginning of the line of the last location you did a jump from; `back-quote` sends you to the actual place within the line.

  33. 2011/10/11David Stewart Zink say:

    Hi! Good start! But you are missing “ `. [[ [{ ]] ]} C-y C-e

    Those are just the ones I use every day. There are probably others ;)

    (tried to post something before, page hung.)

  34. 2011/10/11Will say:

    What a neat idea! The only thing I would change is the “Before X” and “After X” actions should be labeled “Until X” (or ’til X, which I believe is why it uses “T”).

  35. 2011/10/12srd say:

    You’re missing ‘M’ right in the middle, which complements ‘H’ and ‘L’ by jumping to the row in the middle of the currently visible part of the buffer.

  36. 2011/10/12Simon say:

    Very cool! My small constructive criticism: ge/gE are more symmetrical with w/W than they are with e/E, so I would swap the order of b/B and ge/gE. Groovey idea.

  37. 2011/10/12Simon say:

    Could you also provide a SVG-graphic? This would allow to make some (colour) changes, and to print it in high quality. Thanks! :-)

  38. 2011/10/12tednaleid say:

    @Simon, sure, there’s now an exported SVG in the bitbucket repo in addition to the transparent png. The green gradient didn’t get exported, but I’m guessing anyone that wants the svg probably wants to put their own touches on it.

  39. 2011/10/13Este wallpaper te ayudará a moverte en vim say:

    [...] de las últimas novedades es un “mapa” de movimiento que nos permitirá conocer cómo desplazarnos a distintas partes de cualquier documento en vim sin [...]

  40. 2011/10/13Mind Booster Noori say:

    Thanks for doing this (and for the transparent background file, saving me time). I did a 100% black background version, here it is for anyone who might be interested:

    http://friendfeed.com/mindboosternoori/ab110d27/vim-shortcuts-wallpaper-with-black-background

  41. 2011/10/31Tom say:

    Any chance of a 1440×900 version for us MacBookAir users?

    Thanks

  42. 2011/12/13再谈Vim say:

    [...] cheat sheet” and you’ll quickly hate life. But not all of them are ugly – there is a smartwallpaper originally designed by Ted Naleid and re-worked with smoother [...]

  43. 2011/12/18Bookmarks for October 15th | Chris’s Digital Detritus say:

    [...] Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper – Ted Naleid – This entry was posted in delicious bookmarks and tagged framework, Javascript, learning, library, vim by chris. Bookmark the permalink. [...]

  44. 2012/03/19The Warm Embrace of Vim, Part 1 say:

    [...] [1] A redditor kindly pointed out the original creator of this awesome wallpaper was Ted Naleid. [...]

  45. 2012/03/23Hype Williams say:

    Linen!

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/469591/random/vim-shortcuts2560x1600_linen.png

  46. 2012/03/23tednaleid say:

    @Hype Williams nice! I love all the remixes people are doing of this and the strange places that it’s popping up.

  47. 2012/03/26akhil say:

    Thanks a ton
    Amazing and usefull wallpaper. Very elegant.

    Regards

  48. 2012/05/10Toksyuryel say:

    Is there a dark version? I prefer to have a black or dark background whenever possible. I really want to use this though.

  49. 2012/05/11tednaleid say:

    @Toksyuryel check out the other comments for some mashups where people replaced the background, a few of them have a much darker background that you might like better.

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