by on April 18, 2009
Today I want to share some of my recently discovered (or good old-timers) tips for the vim editor.
If you are using highlighted search you can un-highlight the last search by typing :noh
A few day ago I wondered if it is possible to use a column-selection in vim. After a quick research I found the block-wise visual mode (CTRL-V) which is exactly what I was searching for. A quick summary of the different visual modes:
v - character-wise visual modeV - line-wise visual modeCtrl-v - block-wise visual mode (under win32 you can use the Ctrl-q key binding)The next useful command is the one-time insert command (CTRL-O) which allows you to ‘execute’ a single normal mode command while typing in insert mode. A typical usage might be to mark a line you are currently typing in via CTRL-O ma. That way you can continue typing in insert after marking the line.
If you are interested in case-insensitive searching the next one might be interesting: Combining the settings set ignorecase and set smartcase allows you to search case-insensitive by default but searches case-sensitive if the search string contains uppercase characters.
The next one is a quick way to convert tabs into space characters:
The last one for today is the position of the current line in the window:
zz - move current line to the center of the pagezt - move current line to the top of the pagezb - move current line to the bottom of the page