Damian Conway, "More Instantly Better Vim" - OSCON 2013

well good morning thanks for coming back I'm sorry about the crush but there's nothing we can do about it so today am I getting anything I am today it's pretty much the same story as last year I'm going to talk to you about what I do with vim so it's basically them in the hands of a maniac I'm going to give you some useful ideas some useful tricks that are going to make your everyday vim editing very much better but I wanted to start out with a completely useless trick that will in no way improve your vim editing I wrote a plug-in this year called SWT C and I wanted to start off just by showing that to you this plug-in does this we're still in vim so the really nice thing about this thank you is that it's all entirely data-driven and if you grab this module which you're going to be able to grab you can basically just write your own episodes as well now everything else today I hope is going to be much more useful from that and you can download it from this place is GD / ibv 2013 I'll show that again at the end so if you don't get it now you can get it later it's a tarball with every bit of software i'm going to show you today and a copy of all the slides you don't have to frantically write stuff down that you're interested in these are the things I want to talk about today four different sections 12 different ideas the first of them has to do with screen width now I don't know about you but I like to always code only 280 columns but that's kind of annoying because it means that just occasionally you need to wrap something so I prefer if I can just occasionally slop over without there being a problem so here for example is the source code of that plugin that I saw and you can see that just occasionally there's a line that runs a little bit long but what I'm doing that I'd like to know when I'm doing that when I'm actually going over the boundary so them has a wonderful option for that it's the color column option if you set color column and then give it a number or in fact you can get of it several numbers separated by commas then it does this it basically just puts some coloring on that particular column so immediately you can tell when you're slopping over now the problem with that is I find that column being there permanently to be just annoying what I'd really like is something a little bit different so I did this instead instead of using the color column built-in I used a function built into vim called match ad and you just give it a regex here the regex is you are at the 81st column virtually and you give it a color to make things and then it does this and now you notice that the only lines that have the little marker on them are the lines that actually go over so I'm not distracted by it but I always get a warning when I'm going over my boundaries if you like to do that as well then it's useful the other thing about color column is even if you don't use it for good you can use it for evil if you set something like this because you can set multiple color columns on April Fool's next year you can bury this in there vim rec file and then whenever they edit it will look like this and they'll have a lot of fun and the thing to do is make a conspiracy with everyone else not to notice it I say my vim is doing this doing what so color column one of the commands that I use more often than anything else I think is the end command that's the thing that takes you to the next match you do a search and then n takes you to the next match in the next match but I like to use the HL search option and that's the option that highlights everything that would have matched your search and that can create problems when I'm going from match to match so here's some text if I search for you then I get a lot of matches and they all get highlighted now as I go next to next to next can you see how hard it is to see where the cursor is that's not really helpful to me so I thought maybe them or to have an HL next as well that somehow highlights the next one that you went to slightly differently at least temporarily so I built myself that by remapping N and capital n to do this initially it was just a very simple thing which is invert the current line of the cursor and then wait a second and then invert it again and when you do that at least it tells you which line you are on so it draws your eye a little bit that still wasn't quite good enough for me so I just started expect excessively working through this the are all in the table you know if even think about what these do and I went through all kinds of things put a ring around it that's kind of nice and then I went exactly the opposite direction and I really want you to draw my eye to it so hide everything else watch this no way you are going to see where that is and then I dialed it back a little bit and the one that I'm working with now just kind of highlights it by blinking at you so they're all in the tarball and you can download it and just adjust it to whatever you want kind of a cool little trick the next thing I want to talk about is whitespace in code I'm really obsessive about whitespace I do not use tab characters I've always got expand tabs turned on I don't like other kinds of weird non-breaking spaces in it and I do not like trailing whitespace at the end of the line so when I have a file like this I don't want there to be tabs in it and I sure as heck don't want there to be a whole lot of white space at the end of the line so how can I tell that that's happening in my files well vim has a couple of options that let you do that the list and list chars option the list chars option lets you specify how you want tabs and non-breaking spaces and trailing whitespace to be represented and then turning on the list option makes them actually do that so you turn those two options on and now exactly the same file has little markers in it to tell you when you've got characters that you don't want to see and that can help you get rid of them now personally I like to use Unicode characters because they look different from the normal stuff that I type and it's easier to say okay that's something a bit special so mine kind of look like that but the lovely thing about it is you can have whatever you want there and you can turn some of them on or not other ones on that you don't care about you know if you use tabs you certainly want to have the tabs highlighted all the time because that's just annoying it's only a list and list chars as options the second set of ideas that I've got for you have to do with laziness and I'm really big on laziness so I don't use emacs can't be doing that many characters at a time so one of the things I like about vim / Emacs is it doesn't have a lot of these awkward key chords I can generally just hit one key and get some useful action out of it with one important exception the most annoying one is Shift semicolon otherwise known as : okay I bet you but I use : commands all the time and it's just really annoying after rollover two keys to get to it especially given that semicolon isn't doing anything particularly interesting anyway how many people know what semicolon does yeah exactly so simple and obvious thing just remap semicolon that doesn't require a shift to : now your old colon will continue to work if you do happen to shift it but now you can just hit one key and get in yourself into a colon command or if you are one of the five people in the room and apparently five people in the entire planet that does use that semicolon you can just no remap the two to each other you've got to say no remap otherwise your mapping A to B and B to a and it will just know that on another forever but if you know remap it'll just swap them around now that's a trick you can use for a whole lots of things if you've got two keystrokes that you don't like or one is more useful to you than the other you can just swap them around with a pair of n-no remaps diffs I do an enormous amount of patching and dipping and dealing with bug reports and so forth but I'm not a fan of syntax colouring I don't know how many people here like syntax colouring yeah it's always the majority I just don't understand it for me it's just a distraction it's just kind of oh my god the colors are everywhere what am i doing there that's the standard syntax color coloring for vim Script man not helpful but occasionally syntax coloring does help so if like me you have it turned off sometimes it's useful to turn it on and diffs and patch files are a great example of that because diffs consists of meta information where did this come from and then commands take this out or put this in and then context around it and it's really hard if it's all white to tell which is which it all just looks the same so if you don't like syntax highlighting for most things you might want to think about setting up an auto command like this where you say look if it's a patch or a reg or Oh diff file just turn the syntax highlighting on for that or if you prefer it to do it with the file type mechanism you can just say look when the file type is a diff whatever its extension is then I want you to turn on the syntax highlighting and then if we go back with that you can see this is actually useful all the meta stuff is in green the things that are coming out are in red the things that are going in are in blue and that just makes it much much easier to see so even if you aren't a regular user of syntax coloring think about setting yourself up some Auto commands that will do that for you when it makes sense to do it for you the way I tend to use them and the way I tend to use my terminal is to have lots of separate terminal windows I'm not a big user of screen or Tmax or something like that I prefer to have separate windows all the time and the problem with having separate windows all the time is that I will forget that I'm already editing a particular file in another is that someone something that other people have yeah so what do you get when you do that you get this all the time boomp oh I've seen you've got a swap file active what do you want to do at this point and basically none of the options are good enough and that's my problem what I discovered was I only ever do two things the first thing I do is quit immediately and then go searching through my terminal windows for where the damn session actually is or if I know there is no session then this must be can often swap file from a previous crash then I tend to use ohtori to open it up read-only so I don't accidentally modify it before I have a chance to look at it and recover it so one of the things you can do in vim is every time it detects a swap file it brings up a swap exists event so you can auto command to say if you get a swap exists event on any kind of file then just set this particular variable its internal to vim the swap choice variable says I am always going to make the choice oh so don't bother showing me all of that crap just assume that I typed oh and get me in there read-only and so I set that up and it was really handy but after a little while I forgot that it was doing that and I start editing the damn file at the end of it I'd go to write and of course it was read-only so I added in a little bit of extra activity which just says look tell me that it's got doing that so I know that this is what's happening so that worked pretty well for a while and if I wanted the other which was quit then I was in the file I just said Zed which is like a reflex to me and I'd be out and I'd be hunting for my remainder of my session but that's what I found I was doing most of the time I'd edit a file and it's a duplicate session ID Zed Zed and then I'd start flicking through on the keyboard each of my terminal windows trying to find the appropriate one that had a session and as soon as I find myself doing that I'm there's no way I'm putting up with that I'm a programmer god damn it that's what I'm good at automating this rubbish or worse still it would be an orphaned swap file so I get to the end of all of my windows and get really irritated and then just have to go and kill the swap file and add it again so all of that sucks so I wrote myself a plugin called Auto swap Mac that just handles everything for me let me demo it for you so if I'm going to edit so let's go back to that file again now what happens if I create a second window here's a second window and I edit the same file watch what happens now it just flips me back into the terminal window that's the correct one and the other terminal window it just flipped me out of it just automatically worked out where it should take me that makes life like a thousand times easier and more importantly it doesn't break my flow of concentration now if I were to accidentally kill that session without saving it now I have a swap file that is newer than what's on the file so normally it would I would again get that there's a swap file what do you want to do about it but this thing is smart enough so if I edit it it does this if you look down the bottom it says swap file detected I'm opening this read-only it found a newer swap file so it just opened it read-only and indeed it is read-only it can't right now if I did in fact overwrite it now I have the situation where my file is newer than my swap file which hasn't been deleted guess what same plug in if you edit it again detects that it's an older swap file and just deletes it for you automatically and then the next time I add it there's no swap file anymore so I get any message at all and that now handles everything that I want to do when I'm dealing with swap files in a safe and reliable way and my life just got significantly better now unfortunately I only set it up to work on a Mac and only with certain headings on the title so that you can find which session it's in but it's in the tarball and you're very very welcome to mess around with it for your platform and your editing setup as well the whole thing here is the idea the third set of topics I want to talk with you about a little bit have to do with the use of them when you are writing not code but when you are writing language predominantly English but I want to talk about other languages as well so I write a lot of documentation in them one thing it really annoys me is when I've been writing some documentation and describing the components that you need for something or the steps that you need to follow for something and I've been writing it and it's you do step a comma then step B comma then step C comma then step D and point where I get to about step D I realize god dammit this should have been a bulleted list because I got too many points in a row and they're not going to be able to follow it so I could go back and edit it and make it into a bulleted list or I could get smart and write a plug-in that does that for me guess which I did so I've got a plugin that you simply put yourself on the part of the text that has the comma separated list you hit one key and you have a bulleted list thank you I hope it gets better if you had a bulleted list you realize you know what this really should just be a comma separated list you hit the same key it auto detects that it was a bulleted list and just turns it back to the ordinary one and you can go back and forth uncertain which one you want note to that it knows English convention so if you look at the very last point there when it goes back to being a bullet another list it adds it and in there and an Oxford comma thank you now one of the issues with this is that there are other conventions as well because if one of your bullets already has a comma in it you can't just turn it into a comma separated list because that's going to change the meaning so what are we doing English if there's already a comma in one of our options semicolons hit the same key and now it comes back with semicolons note that when there's an and at the end here when we go to it being a list it just removes the and because it's superfluous there however if it wasn't an and if it was some other kind of conjunction it knows to keep it and put it on the end of the penultimate option and then when you go back again it rearranges it and puts it after the final Oxford comma it's pretty damn smart so you don't have to worry about lists anymore you can just swap them back and forth it also has a binding for visual mode so you can just visually select a bit of it and get that turned into a list if you want to the plugins called list trans guess what it's in the tarball one of the things I really really like about them is that I can use it anywhere in the world so quite a few of my clients when I'm teaching them or other things don't actually speak English very well in all kinds of parts of the world and so what I want to do for them is stick to the the subset of English that's known as basic English it's just a couple of thousand words that are the common words in English but the problem is that when you write a slide like this how do you know which words are okay in which are not so what I did was I created a new spelling list that only had the words of basic English in it and I created some mappings that allow me to turn it on and when I turn it on then all of the correctly spelled English words that are not in the basic English subset get highlighted as errors and I can just go through and replace them with words that are acceptable and that simply removes the highlighting from them this is a standard spell checker that's in vim 7 so I'm not doing anything special the only thing I did was make my own spelling dictionary and of course I've got a mapping to turn it back off again when I'm happy with it the way you make your own spelling dictionary is we were built in called make spell you tell where you want it to put it and you better put it in your dot vem subdirectory so it can find it again and then you just give it a file in which each word is on its own line just in like the standard user shared dict but the great thing is you can choose whatever you want so it might not be that you need to use basic English but it might be that there are certain words that you are not allowed to use in your documentation for legal reasons well you could just copy the standard dictionary across remove those words make up a dictionary like that and just switch into it and then any time that you used one of those words it would come up read I kind of find that very handy the other thing I love about vim is you're not restricted to ASCII with them I really like it that if I want to say no hablan will chosen glass I can do it with the correct punctuation using latin-1 and in some cases Unicode characters the only problem with that is that the way that you have to put those characters in is with digraphs and i can never remember the dygraf code for anything I know why it is it just doesn't work for me so here's my workflow when I'm doing digraphs I get to the point where I need to put an O acute in and I do ctrl K and then I stop I know it's a no how do I get the acute and so what I do is I in the end I say some rude words not very rude words I double escape out of the ctrl K and out of the insert mode I do : while a semicolon digraph I hunt through the list of all the digraphs finding the one that I want memorize it come back go into insert mode again ctrl K and then type it in it's actually Oh ' and then I get my our cute and pretty much every damn time I'm going to have to do that so there's no way I'm doing that my first idea was why don't I just remap ctrl K so that it automatically temporarily jumps out of insert mode with a ctrl o does a digraphs command and then jumps back in and types in the ctrl K for me that'd be cool unfortunately it's way too cool because you do that it jumps out shows the digraphs then jumps immediately back in which wipes the digraphs off and your visual acuity has to be extraordinary to do that in time so what I did was I rewrote it into a function I said I'm going to overload it so that whenever I do control K it calls this function and what's the function going to do the function is going to call digraphs and then the cutting bit is and then it's going to call get char it's going to throw away the character it gets but it's going to sit there and wait till I type something and then it's going to return a ctrl K and because it's an expression mapping that ctrl K will become what it actually does so when you do that you end up with this I'm in insert mode I do a ctrl K I find what I want I hit my character to return and just type it in and I was really happy with that for about 10 seconds because it kept interrupting my flow it had fill the screen with diagraphs and I'd lose context of where I was what I realized that what I wanted was in fact a heads-up display of digraphs and I wanted help in narrowing down the choices that I had to make because it's still a hunt-and-peck so I wrote a plug-in surprise surprise and with that plug-in when I do a ctrl K this happens note that the line where I'm typing is still there so I don't lose context and I got a low visibility version of the different characters that I might want to type now I know it's an overcooked so when I type Oh watch what happens yeah it strips out the ones that I don't want and I can look for the akid symbol and just type the one that I want oh I missed it hang on let me do it again Oh Oh cute thank you so that was great but that highlighted the real problem for me which is if I could just remember the damn digraphs I wouldn't need this assistance and the mnemonics for them are terrible they're great for Bram for the rest of us who knows so since they suck I wrote another version of this module with sequences that make sense and what makes sense to me is if I want o acute I should type O a if I want Oh till the OT if I want C cedilla C C so that's what I did so my final version now looks like this oh sorry ctrl K oh and an a will give me a cute Oh tilde C cedilha I'm now thinking about maybe I should just delay the heads-up give myself half a second to actually type it in and if I don't get there in time then have the heads-up come up haven't got that yet but this is in the tarball both versions are in the table or whether you want standard vanilla diagraphs or the specialty diagraphs they're both there and you can just choose yourself and frankly the arrangement of the how do we map the digraphs is so simple in the actual plugin that if you didn't like my choices it would be a very simple manner to go in and edit and change them to your choices final section of things I want to talk about have to do with my very favorite tool in vim and that is the visual modes who loves the visual modes visual block mode you don't know what these are these are the modes that allow you to hit a key v or capital V or control V and then select a region of text which gets highlighted and then once you've got the text selected then apply an action to it it's a fantastic way of doing things but it's not perfect so I want to make it perfect something I find myself doing remarkably often is pulling up a scratch buffer and just typing in some numbers someone's feeding me information about something or I'm looking it up in a book or something and I want to get the whole list of numbers and then the end I'm going to want to add them up I don't want to do it in a on screen calculator I hate on-screen calculators because you get halfway through and you can't remember how many the numbers you've put in I'm certainly I want to pull up a full spreadsheet even the spreadsheet that you can get for vim isn't going to do it for me all I want is typing a column of numbers and then add it up how hard would that be well it was surprisingly hard but guess what I did yeah I wrote a mugging to do that it sums averages dices slices you name it so I've typed in a whole lot of numbers and now I just hit plus plus because that's what I mapped it to and down the bottom you can see the sum the average the minimum the maximum and yes the average is done with the correct mathematical approximation so you don't get too many decimal places to it instead of doing it just like that you can do it actually in visual block mode so if you just highlight so the integers and double plus it then you get the sum of just the integers like that and because you're averaging integers you can use more decimal places because they're precise and it's smart so if you do something like this and you've got things that are not numbers in it it just sucks the numbers out of them and adds them up for you and it's really smart because if you have things that look like numbers which which are clearly not numbers it doesn't add them into the average so if I do it again you get exactly the same average and of course that was great that was very helpful but what do I want to do now that I've got those numbers I want to put them in something I want to type them in somewhere so you'll notice down the bottom it says sum average min and Max and one of the letters is underlined that's the yank buffer that has that value in it now so if I get that information then I can just literally say from s put from a put now I don't know about you but this is something that I do surprisingly often and my life got better once I worked out how to do it easily plugins called V math in the tarball yeah you're not sure what this one's going to be about I really love visual block mode I love being able to select a column of something and do something with it the only problem is visual blocks don't always act like visual blocks and then they're worse than useless so here's a table and there's a visual block selection and what I'd like to do is sort those things alphabetically so I go : sort what's going to happen that's going to happen whenever you do a colon command on a visual block the colon command applies to the entire lines that the block spans not just to the text that the block is highlighting so I didn't end up with my key characters in alphabetical order I ended up with my sequence numbers because they were the sortable thing at the start of each line very annoying fortunately guess what there's a module I didn't write this one I thought I should show you something else that someone did and this module again you do a block selection you do colon and then you type the capital B meaning apply this only to the actual block and you do your sort then and lo and behold it does just sort the data in the actual block and any command that you could do as a colon command will only be applied to the actual text in the block this makes it so much is well I'm nearly at the point where I'm remapping colon in visual mode to be : B because it's just so much more useful so that's provided by a plug-in called vis dot vim it isn't in the tarball but the URL for it is in the PDF that's in the tarball so you can find it the last tool and this is the favorite thing that I've done all year with vim scripting it's actually kind of a viewer submission after my vim talk last year Steve Matney came up after with his Steve in the room are you here Steve obviously not he's done his good work and he's left our planet and he showed me a couple of mappings that he had set up in visual mode that helped him move visual mode data around and they're fairly weird-looking mappings and I'm not going to go into the details on it's not important because I took these and I thought you know what they're great but they've got some nasty edge cases and I don't quite do what I want as easily as I want so I wrote a plugin that did exactly what I want and added it in all kinds of other cosmic powers and it's just much easier to demonstrate to you what this does because as soon as you see it you'll get the idea so suppose we select a column here watch this who's experiencing lust at the moment good that's what I want you to do and it works either on visual blocks or entire visual lines then of course you can only move up and down your life will never be the same I use it for all kinds of things so you remember this was the data format for that stupid thing at the beginning and you'll write something like this and you realize oh damn that vim is like off by one character well guess what block select it move it across by one character nothing else moves you don't grab the tar ball for any other reason grab it for that that's not even my favorite thing that it does it just exports one function that you can call and I mapped it just to my left right up and down because it seemed natural for me to do that but it has one other tool that's actually even more useful to me and it's a function called duplicate what this does is it lets you select a visual block and then you type capital D and you get a draggable copy of it and then you do this and then you do that and you're done so you know where it is it's in the tarball I know there are some vim masters and mistresses in this room but it doesn't matter how well you know them there's always another option to pick up on and there's always some behavior that you can Reese crypt and make it more convenient to your workflow there's always something you can Borg from somebody else and the reason for that is simple because editing is annoyance the editor doesn't work there unless you are brand Mulliner it doesn't work exactly the way you wanted it to but guess what you can make it work the way you want it to grab the tarball that's the URL again my entire vim rec is up on github if you want to go trawling for other goodies and evils try some of these things out you're good enough adapt them to your own needs thank you very very much have a great oz con and by the way I teach this kind of stuff get in touch with everyone no more thank you you

Channel: O'Reilly

Views: 264,153

Rating: 4.8987474 out of 5

Keywords: Vim (Software), O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Conference Series), Damian Conway, Thoughtstream, Mainstage, OSCON, Open Source Software (Industry), programming tips, open source tips, open source tools, open source tricks, text editing, open source convention, O'Reilly Media (Business Operation), tech convention, technology convention, tech conference, Technology (Professional Field), O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media, OReilly, OReilly Media, OReillyMedia

Id: aHm36-na4-4

Length: 38min 51sec (2331 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/huwiler]

Damian Conway is the Hemingway of technical writers. I consider his Object Oriented Perl text to be a timeless classic and probably the single book that influenced + helped me out the most back in my early programming years.

[u/erlanggod]

A long time ago in a terminal far,
far away....

>           Episode IV             <
>                                  <
>           A NEW HOPE             <
>                                  <

|It is a period  of  software  war.|
|Agile dev teams, checking out from|
|a distributed codebase,  have  won|
|their  first  symbolic   victories|
|against the fanatical  GNU Empire.|

|During  the  battle,  Open  Source|
|hackers have  managed  to clone an|
|unauthorized source archive of the|
|Empire's new ultimate weapon,  the|
|EMACS  TAR:  a  fully  operational|
|operating system  with  sufficient|
|Alt-Meta-Ctrl-commands to  destroy|
|the carpal tunnels  of  an  entire|
|planet.                           |

|Evading GNU's copy-sinister agenda|
|the mysterious  Vimlord,  Con Wei,|
|dashes off new Vimscript tools  in|
|his heavily fortified text-editor,|
|custodian of the latest  tips  and|
|plugins that may save  his  people|
|effort, and restore efficiency  to|
|the keyboard....                  |

[u/i_need_your_love]

I long ago reached the point where I spend more time fiddling with my vim settings than actually using vim for real work. My time wasters at the moment are http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com and Google maktaba. For sure vim makes me less productive...

[u/[deleted]]

Dude, what's with the tough crowd? I thought the jokes were funny! OsCon crew must have pretty high standards I guess.

[u/the_cat_kittles]

pretty weird to focus so much on some things and completely dismiss syntax highlighting- i think good syntax highlighting is the most important because it helps you find mistakes

[u/Tw1stedL0gic]

I would love to see something like this but in Emacs.

[u/unrulypainter]

came to comments looking for a link to the tarball... Since nobody linked it, here it is:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx3f0gFZh5Jqc0MtcUstV3BKdTQ

[u/joeframbach]

That was painful to watch. He was so proud of those jokes.

[u/moor-GAYZ]

He's not using gVim, instead using console vim in an ugly console with a non-blinking white cursor on black background. Writes an ugly hack to blink highlight current line when searching. I disapprove.

btw why no syntax highlighting?

What's up with a plugin for converting comma-separated lists into bullet lists, I guarantee that you'd spend more time and mental effort remembering its name and how it's used, rather than 1) select the text and replace commas with newlines (V :s/,/\r/) 2) select the first column and insert your bullets (<ctrl-V> <down down down> <shift-I>- <Enter>). It's better to learn to use general-purpose tools well than to create a very special purpose tool for something you need once a year.