Advanced Vim

You use your editor all day, every day. But how much of that editor do you actually use? Vim is a massive and powerful development tool, but most Vim users use less than 10% of its features.

This tutorial explores many of the less widely known but more powerful features of the Vim editor, and explains how developers can greatly improve their productivity by optimizing, automating, or even eliminating the common coding tasks they perform every day. Topics covered include:

• Advanced navigation
• Smart search modes
• Text and filename autocompletion
• Extended regex syntax
• Understanding and using the numerous input modes
• Handy configuration options
• Using registers and register persistence
• The text folding mechanism
• Building your own editing commands
• Active highlighting techniques
• Maps, abbreviations, macros, and other short-cuts
• Calling other tools from Vim
• Safeguarding and recovering your work