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.

Contents

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 Linux and BSD distributions will have a POSIX-compliant implementation of ed(1) and vi(1) installed. Many will also have vim(1) installed. Most offer vim and neovim packages.

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

Configuration

Vim uses a custom configuration langauge. See Vimscript and Vim9script.

See here for details on configuring this family of programs.

Tips

Regular Expressions

For help with writing regular 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

Search and Replace Expressions

If a placeholder like "LINENO" should be replaced with the actual line number, try:

:%s/LINENO/\=printf("%d", line('.'))/

Arithmetic can also be done e.g. line('.') - 1.

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")).

System Clipboard

The system clipboard can be interacted with like any other register.

On Linux, generally...

+ is the desktop clipboard (XA_SECONDARY)
* is X11 selection (XA_PRIMARY)

Try using gg"*yG to yank the entire buffer.

Vim

Vim