Vim

vim(1) is a terminal text editor. It is closely related to a family of editors stretching from ed(1) to nvim(1), but vim(1) is both the most commonly available and most visible.

History

ed(1) is a line editor. Originally created by Bell Labs for Unix, GNU ed is a POSIX-compliant implementation.

ex(1) is the extended line editor written for the first Berkeley Software Distribution. It is POSIX-compliant implementation of ed(1).

vi(1) is a visual text editor built on ex(1). Type a colon (:) to enter ex mode.

vim(1) is vi improved.

nvim(1) is a fork of vim(1) with a significantly refactored codebase, including...

• The UI and editor processes are separate, enabling the creation of other (often non-terminal) UIs.

• Directory scanning follows modern standards (i.e. XDG on *nix, !AppData on Windows).

• Features moved from third-party plugins were incorporated to the project, generally making user configurations more portable across platforms.

Installation

All *nix distributions will have a POSIX-compliant implementation of ed(1) and vi(1) pre-installed.

Many distributions will also have vim(1) pre-installed. Most will at least offer vim and neovim packages.

For Windows users, while GVim is an option, Neovim is strongly recommended. Chocolatey offers a neovim package.

Configuration

See here for details on configuring this family of programs.

Tips

Regular Expressions

For help with writing regualr expressions in vim(1), look here.

Searching for Non-ASCII Characters

Vim regular expressions can use hexadecimal to represent non-ASCII code points, but the syntax differs for literal characters and character classes. Try...

• /\%x30 to search for the number 0

• /[^\x00-\x7F] to search for any non-ASCII code point

  • Note the omitted percent sign

Similar syntax is available for Unicode code points, especially multibyte characters. Try...

• /\%u201c to search for left curly quotes

• /[\u201c-\u201d] to search for left or right curly quotes

  • Note the omitted percent sign

• /\%u00a0 to search for non-breaking spaces

Quoting Words

Affixes can be applied programmatically using word deletion and registers. For example, to quote the currently selected word, use ciw'Ctrl+r"'.

• ciw - delete selected word and enter insert mode

• ' - insert the leading quote mark

• Ctrl+r" - insert the contents of the " register, a.k.a. the deleted word

• ' - insert the trailing quote mark

This method can be used to apply any affixes. To surround an SPSS string variable name with the trimming functions, use ciwrtrim(ltrim(Ctrl+r")).

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