Vim

Over the past year I have written about moving over to Google+ and switching away from emacs. Both of those experiments didn’t achieve the intended results. I told you I’d keep you updated, and now I’ve added some updates to each of those articles.

[Another in my series of posts on Vim]

If you’re writing natural language text you may wish to format your paragraph so that the text wraps before lines get too long. Here’s how you do it:

To set the maximum width of a line of text, go to Normal mode and enter

:set textwidth=72

[Another in my series of posts on Vim]

Sometimes when you’re typing natural language text, you find yourself wanting to rephrase the sentence you’ve written so far.  You could hit backspace many times to delete the characters to the left of the cursor, or you could type Ctrl-W.  When you’re in Insert mode, Ctrl-W will delete from the cursor to the beginning of the previous word.

[Another in my series of posts on Vim]

If you’re a developer, you will often find yourself having to insert a line of dashes or hashes (#) or asterisks into your comments.  In this post I’ll show you how to do this quickly.  Memorize this because you’ll wind up doing this often.  Position the cursor to the beginning of a blank like (in command mode) and enter the following:

80a#<ESC>

When I first learned how to exist on UNIX, in 1988, I used vi as my primary editor. During the next nine years I taught myself how to become a power user - migrating from the simple motion and copy and paste to more complex skills like marks and named registers. When I started graduate school I saw many of the professors and grad students using emacs.  I tried it out a couple of times, but it was not until 1997 that I decided to take the time to stick with emacs and take the time to learn the right way to do things even when I could get the job done faster in vi.