Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper

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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.

56 Responses to “Vim Movement Shortcuts Wallpaper”

  3. Rys

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

  8. Steve Howarth

    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

  11. Steve Howarth

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

  12. greg

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

    In Vim we trust !

  16. jaux

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

  27. Jeroen Leenarts

    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. :)

  29. tednaleid

    @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)

  31. tednaleid

    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. David Stewart Zink

    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. David Stewart Zink

    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. Will

    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. srd

    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. Simon

    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. Simon

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

  38. tednaleid

    @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.

  42. 再谈Vim

    [...] 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 [...]

  46. tednaleid

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

  47. akhil

    Thanks a ton
    Amazing and usefull wallpaper. Very elegant.

    Regards

  48. Toksyuryel

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

  49. tednaleid

    @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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