{"id":1122,"date":"2024-11-28T13:57:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-28T18:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/?p=1122"},"modified":"2024-11-28T15:26:16","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T20:26:16","slug":"i-learned-a-little-vim-thing-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/2024\/11\/i-learned-a-little-vim-thing-today\/","title":{"rendered":"I learned a little vim thing today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is kind of a long ramble about vim, and a little bit about the joy of forgetting and re-learning the basics<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been using vim regularly for nearly 20 years. I had an Asus 7″ Eee PC back in university and initially, after breaking out of its preinstalled Mandrake or Mandriva or whatever distro it had, I didn’t have any window management system at all. I was usually ssh’d into servers for schoolwork, so I had to use something terminal-based, and my style was far more walk around thumb-typing on the tiny keyboard than stopping to fumble complex meta key combos, so I fell for vim hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere a year or two into my vim journey, already an expert at :<line_no><\/code> (goto line_no) and hjkl-movement, and dd<\/code> (cut a line) and yy<\/code> (yank a line) and 3dd<\/code> (cut 3 lines) and g=G<\/code> (go to top of the file, autoindent to the bottom of the file) and complex regex find and replaces like :10,20s\/file:\\(.*\\).[a-z]\\+\/\\1<\/code> (between lines 10 and 20 change patterns like file:hello.tgz<\/code> to hello<\/code>), somewhere in there, I learned about the grammar of vim, e.g. ciw<\/code> for “change in word<\/code>” or dt'<\/code> for “cut til '<\/code>“, and damn, I have to say, I felt I knew vim pretty good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 10 years ago, I started using Sublime Text 2 more frequently for professional work. I’d never been a big vim plugins guy (of course I had custom syntax colours!) but I wasn’t up on NERD tree and fzf plugins and goodness knows what else. I had developed the opinion that I liked vim because<\/em> of its spartan, austere simplicity, and the guarantee it’d be the same no matter where I went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I was one of those<\/em> people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Sublime Text 2 had a fuzzy filename search I could open by just typing command-p, and that was a revelation for me at the time. I suddenly saw codebases very, very differently: I only needed to know the gist of the name of the thing I was looking for to find the thing, fast<\/em>. That and multiple cursors<\/em> — I got even better with multiple cursors than I ever was with vim’s find and replace. I could slice and dice text like mad! I likely could have got the same things over in vim, too, but the (maybe imagined) barrier of plugin management system hell kept me at bay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My vim skills languished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could still use vim fine<\/em>, but over years, I stopped being anywhere near as comfortable or as fluid as I once had been. I wanted a mouse. I wanted my multiple cursors. I only ever opened vim in SSH sessions or for toy projects with <20 files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jump to yesterday: I’m working on a small game in Godot, editing my gdscript code in Godot’s built-in editor. I’m maintaining a TODO list in a text file outside of the editor, so of course I’m just opening in vim. As I write up lines of todos, I occasionally shuffle them around. To do that, I tend to initiate a visual selection of a few lines by hitting v<\/code> and select across them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

then I hit d<\/code> to cut<\/code> the lines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

and wow<\/em> is it annoying how it omits the rest of the line. So I u<\/code> to undo, v<\/code> to re-enter visual selection, and then manually scroll my selection down and alllll<\/em> the way across that last line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Then I hit d<\/code> again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

there, that’s better. Got the whole line cut to move elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I think: Wyatt — you must<\/em> be doing this wrong. You cannot really believe that in vim you’re supposed select character by character all the way<\/em> to the end of the line, just to copy+paste a selected block of text in the most common way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That critical voice was right! A brief search later, I’ve found at least two good options. Here they are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, I could use $<\/code> to pop the selection to the end of the line, which (along with its go-to-start complement, ^<\/code>) I almost never use, because almost every time I’m jumping to the end or start of a line I want to get into insert mode, so I instead use SHIFT+a<\/code> (go to end and enter insert) or SHIFT+i<\/code> (go to beginning and enter insert), then my dumb hands actually hit ESC<\/code> very often<\/em> to get back to command mode when I didn’t want to insert!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, and I think this is even better: using D instead of d will just cut directly to the end of the line<\/em>. So I can be here (at the initial spot I was in, with a visual selection at the start of a line I want to cut):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

and just hit D<\/code> instead of d<\/code>, and then I go straight to here, with the line cut:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These are very basic things. Tiny facts. I think I likely even knew them at points in the past, but somewhere along the way I forgot how to use them in concert. Maybe I managed to skip right by them in the first place, or all along, and just never the pieces together in this way. Seeing them here, I think: well this is obvious. This is the way I’m going to do it forever. But who knows? Maybe I’ve thought that before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As is often said, learning vim is a lifelong journey. But that’s not just true in the ways you know it is; it’s also true in new<\/em> ways, which you only discover as you go along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a post script, of course I know<\/em> I could just use the commands 3dd<\/code>, (or<\/em> 3D<\/code>) to “cut 3 lines<\/code>” and get the same result even faster. I even mentioned 3dd<\/code> way up above! But I very rarely have a clear “I want this many lines” mindset when editing text idly. I tend to start selecting text, and I know what I want when I see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is kind of a long ramble about vim, and a little bit about the joy of forgetting and re-learning the basics. I’ve been using vim regularly for nearly 20 years. I had an Asus 7″ Eee PC back in university and initially, after breaking out of its preinstalled Mandrake or Mandriva or whatever distro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1130,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions\/1130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}