“More Instantly Better Vim”

Damian Conway customizes his favorite editor

Maybe you’re a hardened veteran of the editor war. Maybe you just need to make Vim do more for you. Or perhaps you just want to watch Damian Conway tell a great story with Vim as the central prop.

At OSCON 2013, Conway showed “Vim in the hands of a Real Maniac”. There’s very little I can do to add to his talk. Watch the whole thing if you’re up for a great performance, or explore the links below if you’re seeking out particular vim superpowers. He posted a tarball with the examples as well.

  • Amazing Star Wars title scroll, in Vim (0:58)
  • I. Signs and Portents (2:41)
    • It’s more of a Guideline, Actually (2:52, and April Fools’ at 4:33)
    • Die Blinkenmätchen – blinking highlights (5:01)
    • Shady Characters – highlighting whitespace (6:53)
  • II. Applied Laziness – doing less to do more (8:24)
    • The Jung and the Shiftless – semicolons are easier to type than colons (8:41)
    • Patch Your Diff’s Syntax (10:11)
    • This file isn’t big enough for the two of us! Dealing with swap files. (12:01)
  • III. Cunning Linguistics – vim in text, not code (17:19)
    • “I’ve got a little list” (17:36, and Oxford comma bonus at 19:10)
    • “No hablo (mucho) Ingles!” Vim can help you stick to basic English (20:30)
    • Accent-uate the Positive digraphs (22:39)
  • IV. Visual Acuity – Visual Block Mode (28:33)
    • The fear of all sums – simple math in Vim (29:00)
    • The surprising convenience of a blocked colon – limiting an action to the block area (31:53)
    • It’s a drag – moving selected blocks (34:10) – and duplicating (36:42)
  • Conclusion – (37:18)
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