Vimcasts

TextMate has a few built in commands for moving selected text around a document. The end end result of using these commands can be achieved by cutting and pasting, but the visual feedback they provide is quite helpful. In this episode, I will show how to replicate these commands in Vim.

Choosing a colorscheme that you find pleasing to look at is essential if you want to be comfortable working with Vim. There are hundreds of colorschemes available, but what if you can’t find one that you like? In this episode, I’ll share a few tips that make it easy to create colorschemes for Vim.

The vimrc file allows you to preserve your settings so that they are restored each time you launch Vim. But what if you want to update your vimrc file in the middle of an editing session? This episode demonstrates a couple of tricks that make it easy to customize Vim on the fly.

HAML and ERB are two commonly used ruby templating languages. You may have a strong preference for one or the other, but it’s not always up to you which one you use. I was recently asked to convert several HAML files to ERB format. In this episode, I will demonstrate a couple of Vim macros that helped make short work of the task.

If you want to edit several adjacent lines with a similar format, you might save a lot of time by making a columnar selection. This episode will demonstrate how to achieve this using Vim’s visual block mode.

Recording your keystrokes as a macro can be a great timesaver, but you have to be careful that you use commands in such a way that they can be reused. In this episode, I construct a fairly complex macro to build a structural HTML document from markdown.

If you work with ruby you will know that the interactive ruby shell, or ‘IRB’ for short, is a useful sketchpad for coding. But the command line interface of IRB can feel quite limiting in comparison with the power of your text editor. In this episode, I’m going to demonstrate how you can get the best of both worlds, by loading Vim from inside IRB.

Using a spell checker is a good habit to get into. In this episode, I demonstrate how to use Vim’s built in spell checking feature.

‘Do one thing and do it well’ is the principle of the Unix toolkit. Editing text is a broad domain, and there are many related tasks with which it overlaps. Vim acknowledges this by enabling certain tasks to be outsourced to external programs which do that one thing, and do it well. This episode will demonstrate how the par program can be used for formatting text.

It is sometimes preferable to format text with hard wrapped lines, for example when writing emails in plaintext. Vim can apply this style of formatting for you. This episode shows some of the options which allow you to customize Vim’s text formatting.