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Advanced Cheat Sheet

Advanced Vim Cheat Sheet

General

Plugins

The most helpful part of plugins is that they make vim a better fully featured IDE. Concepts like global search and finding a file to open are solved with plugins. They also can bring out some missing features of vim, like automatic commenting.

Essential Plugins

  • vim-pathogen: Either this or Vundle are good ways to manage your plugins.
  • vim-sensible: tiny set of reasonable defaults that every vim user should have. This allows you to keep your .vimrc a bit smaller.
  • ag.vim: Fantastically fast global searches.
  • ctrlp.vim: Open up any file or buffer.
  • nerdcommenter: Allows you to comment some block of code

Awesome Plugins

  • indentLine: Shows you visibly your tabs or spaces, like sublime
  • neocomplete.vim (or YouCompleteMe): Autocomplete
  • nerdtree: File browser
  • vim-surround: Quicker way to add or delete some characters around something
  • tagbar: Similar to the "outline" feature of many IDE's

Regex and Searching

  • Searching in vim is very unintuitive. There are 4 modes of searching, ranging from "very magic" to "very no magic". They determine what needs to be escaped with a \ in your search term. If you just want "regex on" or "regex off" then always search in Very Magic or Very No Magic mode.
  • Check out the details by running :h \\v.

Perl style regexes (Very Magic Mode)

Start a search with \v. Everything else can act like a normal regex search, except you have to escape / and \. If you are searching backwards, you’ll also have to escape ?.

  • E.g. search for a url starting with www and ending with .com: \vwww\..*\.com

Differences from Perl Regex

The < and > characters are special for start and end of word. Escape them to search for them literally.

Literal Search (Very No Magic Mode)

Start a search with \V. Now you only have to escape / and \. It would be nice if you didn't have to escape anything, but alas vim is not like this.

Advanced: Match a subsection of your search

Let's say you have this file

www.yahoo.com
blah some other stuff
www.google.com
www.ebay.org

And you want to change it to

www.chase.com
blah some other stuff
www.chase.com
www.chase.org

What you're doing is saying find all domain names and change the inner part to chase. You can do this by specifying the part of the search to match. Put \zs before where you want to match and \ze after where you want to match.

So in this case: \v www\. \zs .* \ze \.com

  • An extension to this is looking for the start of a word without matching it. For example looking for the variable i. We could then use this search: \v\W\zsi\ze\W. Note: Use \W matches everything except [a-zA-Z0-9_]
    • There’s a shortcut called word boundaries, with < and >:
      • \v<i> (More info)
      • You can get this same behavior by pressing * in normal mode, while having your cursor over the word you want to search.

Faster Search and Replace

  • Vim 7.4 has an amazing "gn" command that allows you to search and replace faster. gn means "select the next search term".