Tag Archives: Vim

“This is Your Brain on Vim”, a hilarious blog post by Kevin Watters, tracing some of the evolution your brain goes through incorporating the awesomeness that is the best text editor ever. ;D

I was watching a violinist bow intensely and I had this thought: I probably have as many brain cells devoted to my text editor as he does to playing his chosen instrument. Is it outlandish to imagine that an MRI of his brain during a difficult solo wouldn’t look much different than mine while manipulating abstractions in that blissful near-fugue state where you’ve mastered your editor and you can create towering structures of mostly-working-out-of-the-gate code as fast you can think?

Via reddit

Let’s say you have a text file with a list of to-do items, like this:

* Download iX rar file
* Charge iPod
* Install iX on iPod
* Return Ender's Game to library
* Track down The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker
* Write post on vim editing trick

In order to better organize and sort the list as you view it, you want to add a [PROJECT] “tag” to each line:

* [PROJECT] Action

Now, to edit your original list, you could go down each line and edit manually. You could even use the . (period) trick and make the same change to each line as desired. But to really speed things up, try this.

1. Put your cursor where you want to add the text; in our case, we’ll start at the “D” in Download on the first line. Since the first three items in our list belong to the same “IPOD LINUX” project, we’ll take care of ‘em all at once.
2. Type CTRL-v
3. Move your cursor down two lines (jj) to indicate where the changes will be made.
4. Type I (capital letter I)
5. Make your changes; it will only show up on the first line while you’re editing.
6. When you’re done with the changes, hit ESC — your edit will be propagated down three lines.
7. Repeat as necessary.

This leaves us with:

* [IPOD LINUX] Download iX rar file
* [IPOD LINUX] Charge iPod
* [IPOD LINUX] Install iX on iPod
* [READING] Return Ender's Game to library
* [READING] Track down The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker
* [BLOG] Write post on vim editing trick

For more, see:

• Vim Tips Wiki: “Inserting text in multiple lines”
• iX Project
• The Snake’s Pass