ANandrewstuart2·Jun 2, 2015Recommendation phrase
I'm all for bending your text editor to your will, but a few of these tips gloss over the core of vim: the shortcut language it offers and the composability of its parts of speech [1].
For example, remapping the paste key to paste + move to end is cool, but `ppppp` to paste 5 times circumvents vim's killer repetition. Want to paste 100 copies? (hopefully you do this rarely). Just type `100p` and you're done. I won't bother typing out the obvious sequence of repeated `p` presses, but you get the drift.
Also, remapping v to progressively select larger surrounding text objects will keep you from learning that you can perform any action on the 3rd parent curly braces by following the action with the text object `3a{` or `3a}`. Select it: `v3a{`, delete it: `d3a{`, comment it out `gc3a{` ([2]), whatever. If there's an action in vim you can pe
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rform it on a text object which can usually start with some count.
I really do mean language, too. When I'm using vim, I feel a lot more like I'm communicating with my computer than trying to figure out how to do what I want to do.
The actions are there: delete, change, select. The direct objects are there: braces, this line, line number N, end of this word, the next character C, this paragraph. The prepositions are there: inside, outside, up to (inclusive, exclusive).
Heck, the sensible defaults feel a whole lot like the "understood" words that you can leave out of sentences. Instead of "navigate to line 30", you can just use the shortcut for "line 30" (30G) and be done.
One of my favorite things about vim is the number of times I've literally been surprised that vim didn't read my mind and go where I was looking. Once you're familiar with the different pieces, it's so good that you might expect it to read your mind.
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[1] http://ferd.ca/vim-and-composability.html
[2] https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary