haroldag writes "I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what's out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?"
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday November 06 2008, @05:50PM (#25668017)
Not really a vim trick, but I always liked to create a file in the / directory named README. The file just contained one line: "ERROR: can not open file README" When someone cats it, they get the error message. Pretty cute until they vi it and figure it out.
If you are on a single box, that is fine. But when you have to admin about 500 servers, spread out across the country, and sometimes over a dial-up link, you often don't have a graphical environment available. Even on the local network, I often ssh from one box to the next, and forget to forward my X11 connections. Since vi is always available, that is what I use.
The other thing is that I appreciate having only minimal hand movement to get around a file and make changes. Much like people used to love the Word Star diamond, the same thing with vi's ctrl-f, ctrl-b, h, j, k, l, etc. And since I've been using it for about 20 years, these commands are second nature to me. Not to mention the search/replace supporting regular expressions (something a lot of gui word processors don't have).
:%s/foo/bar/g
go through all the file and replace foo by bar:12,20s/foo/bar/
from line 12 to 20 replace foo for bar:s/foo/bar/g
in the current line replace foo for bar
the g after the last / means to replace all the occurrences of foo vby bar and not only the first one.
Replace all occurrences in the next 20 lines from the current line only. Great when your editing code and you've realised you used the wrong variable name in that method for example.
Try using most GUI editors on a remote server over ssh. Kate may be an exception with KDE's nice network abstraction I don't know (I use Gnome), but to be honest for me the main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).
main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).
vi is part of the Single UNIX Specification, so anything passing itself off as UNIX must include vi. Even without the spec, it's much, much more universal than emacs, and more powerful than pico/nano.
I use Vim primarily because I can perform almost any task without moving my fingers from the standard typing position. I certainly feel much more efficient being able to (for example) use j/k/l/h for movement than moving my hand over to the arrow keys, or worst, to the mouse. That's one of many tasks which simply becomes natural over time (in fact, when I'm typing in a web form, I frequently find myself trying to use Vi shortcuts) and which really make things go more smoothly for me. Even when I'm on a full desktop, I prefer using Vim. I only wish the OS X port of gvim worked better.
The reason that I don't use EMACS is because of the finger gymnastics you have to perform for even the simplest of tasks. Of course, one could complain similarly about Vi--having to switch to command mode is something that gets just about every single newbie.
Young whippersnappers. When I was "at a young age", it was called vi, and it didn't have any of this fruity syntax highlighting, and if you wanted to navigate around a document you had to use h,j,k,l, not those hand-holding arrow keys.
Remember the old dig at emacs, "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?" Well back then, an 8 MB program actually did mean constant swapping!
Yes, please tell me about your years spent on Ultrix, Altos and other boxes. You modern kidz and your GUI. The main reason why I use OSX is because I can ssh *and* run Microsoft office at the same time. If you don't understand syntax like
run *kermit
load * (Oh, the magical keys on the c64)
and having to spend time at bps rates lower than 9600 when performing tasks, you clearly don't appreciate the speed increases over the years the same as some of us. I remember going from 300->1200->2400bps. Now I
Sigh. I'm sure I'm not the only one here... I distinctly remember purchasing my first 9600bps modem. (A real Hayes, no less! I sent them a large manilla SASE and they shipped me the AT command manual for no charge.) I spent a few months mowing every lawn I could to raise the funds for it. Exactly a week after I got it installed and found a couple local BBSes I could connect to at 9600, Hayes shipped the very first 14400bps modem.
Apart from the nature and amount of labor involved in raising funds, that's been a pattern for so many equipment purchases since. That was the very first time I bought something so close to the release of the new shiny, though:-)
Use visual mode (shift-v) to highlight lines, then shell out to external programs to filter them, such as perltidy. To do that, with lines highlighted, type !perltidy (assuming you have it on your machine). This lets you filter specific lines instead of the whole file.
xp - reverse next two characters
dL - Delete to end of page, in other words, everything visible.
C - Often overlooked: chop off end of line and go into insert mode.
There are far too many "essential" commands in vim, but if I had to pick the two that make the most difference, I would pick * and =. * searches for the word under the cursor and = indents the selected text (most useful for programming).
:ret over highlighted text will reformat using the tabbing rules set up in your.vimrc files. Quite handy when you have legacy code and new code mixed together leaving a big mess when opened in a viewer with different settings.
And, to remove the ^M from files that came from windows: :se ff=unix
Am I just a vim noob? After doing a search and loving the nice highlighting, is there a way to unhighlight the search term without doing a "/lkasjdfkjdfdf"? In less(1), you'd hit <esc>u but haven't found anything for vim.
The tricks I use in vi/vim are mostly the arcane flags.
:set nows
will not search past the top or bottom.
:set sw=4
will make a nice indentation shiftwidth, especially for using the indent command (>). Works great for programming, especially with autoindent (:set ai). But when programming with autoindent, you often need to unindent one shiftwidth... do that by typing control-D at the beginning of the line. You can go to the very beginning of an autoindented line with 0 control-D.
:set list :set nolist
will turn on/off hidden characters, and show end of lines. Great for finding tabs or spaces at the end of a line.
:set nu
will turn on line numbering.
Of course, if you want actual line numbers in your file, in *nix you'd use :%!cat -n
%
when pressed over a parenthesis, finds the matching parenthesis or brackets
Now, I want someone to write a lisp interpreter based in vi macros. That way we can port emacs to vi.
Am I just a vim noob? After doing a search and loving the nice highlighting, is there a way to unhighlight the search term without doing a "/lkasjdfkjdfdf"? In less(1), you'd hit u but haven't found anything for vim.
Very cool. I didn't know how to mark a range like that before.
And, while we're having fun with search and replace, ^ will match the beginning of a line, so if you mark as above, and then change the command to::'a,'bs/^/#/
you will have commented out a section of your code without having to insert a comment character independently on each line. Reverse it with::'a,'bs/^#//
to remove the comments.
Also, you don't have to use the / command as a separator. Anything typed after s will become the separator, so if you want to, say, change all your Windows paths to Unix paths, instead of starting with::%s/\\/\//g
which, while undeniably cool, can be more easily written as::%s;\\;/;g
which is a little easier to read.
Two other interesting bits:
u all by itself will undo the last command. Handy when you're testing your commands before posting them to Slashdot.
Also, Slashdot's editor will remove the newlines before any line that starts with a : In my examples, I put each command on it's own line, but Slashdot keeps appending them to the previous line. Weird.
Also, you can do use "ma" to mark the beginning line, "mb" to mark the ending line, and then:
:'a,'bs/FROM/TO/g
And if you add a c (confirm) to the end
:'a,'bs/FROM/TO/gc
you will get a Y/N to replace that instance or not, in case you don't want to replace every occurrence. if you search like this:'a,'b g/FINDME/ s/FROM/TO/gc
vi will ask for confirmation to replace FROM to TO only on line between a and b markers on lines with the string FINDME on it.
:.,$ g/FINDME/p
will search from your current cursor position (.) to the end of the document ($) and get/regular expression/ print (i.e grep) inside of vi.
456G
go to the 456 line (G for the last line)
These are a few of my favourite things. Vi plugin for Eclipse and Visual Studio actually makes them have a worthwhile editor, I couldn't imagine not having all the effort I invested into using vi available in some of the "editors" available today.
One of vi's best features is the '.' command to repeat what you last did. You can do 'dd' to delete a line, then press '.' (dot) to do it again. Or '100.' to do it 100 times. Typing in numbers before a command repeats the command. Typing in '100ihello[esc]' will insert 'hello' 100 times. Then typing dot will give you 100 more.
On a modern vi you can press up-arrow after pressing colon to get your previous colon command back for editing.
Some examples of changing things on various lines:
# add 'gronk' to the end of every line # 1 is line 1, $ is the last line :1,$ s/$/gronk/ # put 'bing' at the start of lines 5-10 :5,10 s/^/bing/ # change foo to bar for all occurrences in the rest of # the file from where the cursor is :s/foo/bar/g
I much rather use Visual mode for this, as I hate having to remember line numbers. Just hit 'V', highlight the region, and then type ':s/FROM/TO/g'. Vim does the rest.
best one ever (Score:5, Funny)
:r! emacs /I partly kid I like Vi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
is itself a stupid trick. Emacs sucks too. Please welcome you to 21 century - use textedit!
No thank you. edlin works just great for me.
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are on a single box, that is fine. But when you have to admin about 500 servers, spread out across the country, and sometimes over a dial-up link, you often don't have a graphical environment available. Even on the local network, I often ssh from one box to the next, and forget to forward my X11 connections. Since vi is always available, that is what I use.
The other thing is that I appreciate having only minimal hand movement to get around a file and make changes. Much like people used to love the Word Star diamond, the same thing with vi's ctrl-f, ctrl-b, h, j, k, l, etc. And since I've been using it for about 20 years, these commands are second nature to me. Not to mention the search/replace supporting regular expressions (something a lot of gui word processors don't have).
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Interesting)
Replace all occurrences in the next 20 lines from the current line only. Great when your editing code and you've realised you used the wrong variable name in that method for example.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:4, Informative)
It's quite easy
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen. Know vi, and know the bourne shell, and you're good on close to 100% of the unix machines you'll ever touch.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Funny)
* leaves himself a note to get cygwin installed on the home system
How can I install that on Ubuntu?
VMware.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
Try using most GUI editors on a remote server over ssh. Kate may be an exception with KDE's nice network abstraction I don't know (I use Gnome), but to be honest for me the main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Interesting)
main utility of vi is that I know it's going to be there in any Linux enviroment (and I suspect Unix in general).
vi is part of the Single UNIX Specification, so anything passing itself off as UNIX must include vi. Even without the spec, it's much, much more universal than emacs, and more powerful than pico/nano.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Vim primarily because I can perform almost any task without moving my fingers from the standard typing position. I certainly feel much more efficient being able to (for example) use j/k/l/h for movement than moving my hand over to the arrow keys, or worst, to the mouse. That's one of many tasks which simply becomes natural over time (in fact, when I'm typing in a web form, I frequently find myself trying to use Vi shortcuts) and which really make things go more smoothly for me. Even when I'm on a full desktop, I prefer using Vim. I only wish the OS X port of gvim worked better.
The reason that I don't use EMACS is because of the finger gymnastics you have to perform for even the simplest of tasks. Of course, one could complain similarly about Vi--having to switch to command mode is something that gets just about every single newbie.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:5, Funny)
Young whippersnappers. When I was "at a young age", it was called vi, and it didn't have any of this fruity syntax highlighting, and if you wanted to navigate around a document you had to use h,j,k,l, not those hand-holding arrow keys.
Remember the old dig at emacs, "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?" Well back then, an 8 MB program actually did mean constant swapping!
I've been in this business for too damn long.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, please tell me about your years spent on Ultrix, Altos and other boxes. You modern kidz and your GUI. The main reason why I use OSX is because I can ssh *and* run Microsoft office at the same time. If you don't understand syntax like
run *kermit
load * (Oh, the magical keys on the c64)
and having to spend time at bps rates lower than 9600 when performing tasks, you clearly don't appreciate the speed increases over the years the same as some of us. I remember going from 300->1200->2400bps. Now I
Re:Just using VIM (Score:4, Interesting)
Sigh. I'm sure I'm not the only one here... I distinctly remember purchasing my first 9600bps modem. (A real Hayes, no less! I sent them a large manilla SASE and they shipped me the AT command manual for no charge.) I spent a few months mowing every lawn I could to raise the funds for it. Exactly a week after I got it installed and found a couple local BBSes I could connect to at 9600, Hayes shipped the very first 14400bps modem.
Apart from the nature and amount of labor involved in raising funds, that's been a pattern for so many equipment purchases since. That was the very first time I bought something so close to the release of the new shiny, though :-)
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally recommend trying to learn Vim alongside with another editor, or using a GUI frontend like GVim.
Replace Vim or GVim with any editor of your choice.
Parent
Re:Just using VIM (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:best one ever (Score:5, Funny)
Password:
# test -f
# cat <<EOF >/bin/emacs
#!/bin/bash
echo emacs: command not found
EOF
# exit
$ logout
Parent
Filter Lines (Score:5, Interesting)
Use visual mode (shift-v) to highlight lines, then shell out to external programs to filter them, such as perltidy. To do that, with lines highlighted, type !perltidy (assuming you have it on your machine). This lets you filter specific lines instead of the whole file.
Couple off-hand (Score:5, Interesting)
Not horribly exciting ones, but useful:
xp - reverse next two characters
dL - Delete to end of page, in other words, everything visible.
C - Often overlooked: chop off end of line and go into insert mode.
Vim tips (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vim tips (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
very useful (especially for noobs) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:very useful (especially for noobs) (Score:4, Funny)
nano
Parent
= and * (Score:3, Informative)
There are far too many "essential" commands in vim, but if I had to pick the two that make the most difference, I would pick * and =. * searches for the word under the cursor and = indents the selected text (most useful for programming).
retab (Score:5, Informative)
And, to remove the ^M from files that came from windows:
Need a way to un-highlight (Score:5, Informative)
Am I just a vim noob? After doing a search and loving the nice highlighting, is there a way to unhighlight the search term without doing a "/lkasjdfkjdfdf"? In less(1), you'd hit <esc>u but haven't found anything for vim.
The tricks I use in vi/vim are mostly the arcane flags.
will not search past the top or bottom.
will make a nice indentation shiftwidth, especially for using the indent command (>). Works great for programming, especially with autoindent (:set ai). But when programming with autoindent, you often need to unindent one shiftwidth... do that by typing control-D at the beginning of the line. You can go to the very beginning of an autoindented line with 0 control-D.
will turn on/off hidden characters, and show end of lines. Great for finding tabs or spaces at the end of a line.
will turn on line numbering.
Of course, if you want actual line numbers in your file, in *nix you'd use
:%!cat -n
%
when pressed over a parenthesis, finds the matching parenthesis or brackets
Now, I want someone to write a lisp interpreter based in vi macros. That way we can port emacs to vi.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you're pasting something, and don't want Vim's autoindent to screw up the formatting use: :set paste
WTF?? (Score:5, Funny)
I typed :Sex and it opened up a HUGE list of folders choc full of porn!
Re:WTF?? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
delete a block of lines larger than the screen (Score:4, Informative)
mm (sets a marker "m")
move down to the last line in the block
d`m (deletes to marker "m", and that's the grave below the tilde, not the back-quote)
Stupid vi tricks? (Score:3, Funny)
VIM is a "stupid vi trick".
Every time I update OS X no I have to dike it out and put the REAL "vi" back.
Re:Stupid vi tricks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, add "set compatible" to your .vimrc file and you have 99% vi behavior.
Why would you use plain vi, when vim is so much better?
Parent
Re:Stupid vi tricks? (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid vi tricks? (Score:2)
by argent (18001)
I believe you and your fancy VIM are on this man's lawn.
Parent
Stack Overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
When did Slashdot become Stack Overflow?
Perhaps two of the weirdest: Ctrl-A and Ctrl-X (Score:3, Informative)
(in vim only), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-X [vim.org] find the next number on the line starting at the cursor, and then increment or decrement it respectively.
Apart from being weird, these are surprisingly useful sometimes, e.g. toggling "#if 0" to "#if 1"...
I think I see a pattern in these stories (Score:3, Funny)
Re::Sex (Score:5, Funny)
You're asking on the wrong site. No one on Slashdot has ever tried it.
Parent
Re::Sex (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re::Sex (Score:5, Informative)
:help sex
e.g. it give you a file exploring pane above the buffer you are currently using.
Parent
Re::Sex (Score:5, Funny)
If only my parents had told me earlier.
Parent
Re:Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
Also, you can do use "ma" to mark the beginning line, "mb" to mark the ending line, and then:
:'a,'bs/FROM/TO/g
Parent
Re:Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
Very cool. I didn't know how to mark a range like that before.
And, while we're having fun with search and replace, ^ will match the beginning of a line, so if you mark as above, and then change the command to: :'a,'bs/^/#/
you will have commented out a section of your code without having to insert a comment character independently on each line. :'a,'bs/^#//
Reverse it with:
to remove the comments.
Also, you don't have to use the / command as a separator. Anything typed after s will become the separator, so if you want to, say, change all your Windows paths to Unix paths, instead of starting with: :%s/\\/\//g
which, while undeniably cool, can be more easily written as: :%s;\\;/;g
which is a little easier to read.
Two other interesting bits:
u all by itself will undo the last command. Handy when you're testing your commands before posting them to Slashdot.
Also, Slashdot's editor will remove the newlines before any line that starts with a :
In my examples, I put each command on it's own line, but Slashdot keeps appending them to the previous line. Weird.
Parent
Re:Replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
And if you add a c (confirm) to the end
you will get a Y/N to replace that instance or not, in case you don't want to replace every occurrence. if you search like this :'a,'b g/FINDME/ s/FROM/TO/gc
vi will ask for confirmation to replace FROM to TO only on line between a and b markers on lines with the string FINDME on it.
456G
go to the 456 line (G for the last line)
These are a few of my favourite things. Vi plugin for Eclipse and Visual Studio actually makes them have a worthwhile editor, I couldn't imagine not having all the effort I invested into using vi available in some of the "editors" available today.
Parent
Re:Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
One of vi's best features is the '.' command to repeat what you last did. You can do 'dd' to delete a line, then press '.' (dot) to do it again. Or '100.' to do it 100 times. Typing in numbers before a command repeats the command. Typing in '100ihello[esc]' will insert 'hello' 100 times. Then typing dot will give you 100 more.
On a modern vi you can press up-arrow after pressing colon to get your previous colon command back for editing.
Some examples of changing things on various lines:
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I much rather use Visual mode for this, as I hate having to remember line numbers. Just hit 'V', highlight the region, and then type ':s/FROM/TO/g'. Vim does the rest.