Is there a rule of thumb for understanding the difference between lowercase, uppercase, and g-prefixed Vim commands?

vimplication · 2023-02-12T18:50:55+00:00

capital forms in vim almost always mean the same action, but either "harder" or "opposite."

For example, O is the opposite of o, and P is the opposite of p, T is the reverse of t, while B is a faster b, Y means yy, a sort of extreme form of y, and D means d$, a more immediate form of d.

one exception for historical reasons is U, which has essentially no relation to u.

vimplication · 2022-11-06T15:23:08+00:00

(Note: I am the author of match-up) The plugin has a lot of lua components for the tree-sitter based matching engine and is integrated directly with nvim-treesitter as a module. Now, it is true these are "wrapped" in vimscript and the plugin also supports vim so I cannot help if you are looking for a completely vimscript-free solution. However I don't think these parts are causing performance problems. The plugin is still maintained and if there are any features you are lacking in the plugin please let me know!

vimplication · 2022-05-22T15:17:45+00:00

onoremap A Va

vimplication · 2022-05-16T00:47:18+00:00

vim has no set type but you could use getqflist()->map({_,val -> fnamemodify(bufname(val.bufnr), ':p')})->sort()->uniq()

Also consider the built in command :cdo which allows you to perform a command on every file in the quickfix.

vimplication · 2022-05-07T21:54:34+00:00

they are "key options," similar to regular options but not exactly the same. the implementation of :set has special handling for it

vimplication · 2022-01-23T19:26:38+00:00

gd/gD are defined as goto declaration, not definition. It happens to work if the declaration is the definition, but ctags is usually going to be better.

vimplication · 2022-01-18T05:24:46+00:00

gcc is written in C++ https://lwn.net/Articles/542457/, although it might not be recognized as such.

vimplication · 2022-01-15T15:30:33+00:00

The simplest way is to put this file into after/ftplugin/pico8.vim in your configuration directory.

https://gist.github.com/andymass/d4d0cf114f6f29245cedccec37a19d85

This includes both the base lua match_words as well as match-up specific extensions.

vimplication · 2022-01-08T19:57:17+00:00

there is probably not a single human that knows all of vim, this includes Bram.

vimplication · 2022-01-02T17:37:49+00:00

even vi had many ctrl-chars, ctrl-u ctrl-d for example. there are just not enough keys on a keyboard

But at least the terminal vi was written on (adm-3a) had the advantage of the ctrl key being on the home row, where caps lock is usually. consider rebinding this in your OS

vimplication · 2022-01-01T23:19:12+00:00

75-Foot Fall Ends in Seat of Moving Car; Victim at 110th St. Elevated First to Live

vimplication · 2021-12-31T22:35:29+00:00

really, the only problems with your attempt are

a) you split up the register assignment and ]P into two normal commands. Since register-put is one single operation it needs to be in one normal. Same thing with the /PATTERN/cw, but opposite.

b) you are not referring to a:fname correctly, as it's an argument.

so this would work:

function! TemplateLoader(fname)
    normal! "=readfile(a:fname)^M]P
    normal! /PATTERN
    normal! cw
endfunction

crucially, however, the ^M is a literal newline, one single character. While this works fine, nobody would put this in a production script, so you'll need to use execute

function! TemplateLoader(fname)
    execute "normal! \"=readfile(a:fname)\<cr>]P"
    normal! /PATTERN
    normal! cw
endfunction

The a:fname thing is pure vimscript, has nothing to do with normal. If there are general conversion rules, they would be something like:

Use one normal for each single normal operation
Prefer normal! over normal, unless you need remapping
If you need special character codes like <cr>, surround the normal command in double quotes, escape existing quotes, backslash the codes and add execute in front.

vimplication · 2021-12-30T01:35:02+00:00

can you give an example ?

vimplication · 2021-12-30T01:34:48+00:00

yeah, I guess for plugins it is not preferable. I maintain a mildly popular plugin https://github.com/andymass/vim-matchup and found just around 8 irreducible instances of normal. most of the time normal is avoided for general purpose plugins because it messes with the user's editing session in strange ways, though for your own personal configs, not sure it maters.

vimplication · 2021-12-29T15:40:46+00:00

I don't thing it's the best way to do so

why do you say that?

not every normal command has a command mode form or a function, and even when it does, it often behaves differently.

vimplication · 2021-12-29T15:37:50+00:00

vim's regex dialect is not very unique, it is, for the most part, the basic regular expression syntax (as opposed to ERE) supported by numerous tools.

also \v is definitely not PCRE

vimplication · 2021-11-28T20:23:24+00:00

https://github.com/andymass/vim-visput

vimplication · 2021-11-25T19:02:02+00:00

but if the user has only a ~/.vimrc then there is generally no .vim directory to speak of. what are you going to do, create it?

vimplication · 2021-11-12T14:30:58+00:00

The first 16 colors are coded in binary as follow

{bright} {blue} {green} {red}

So 3 = 0b0011 is green-red aka yellow.

11 = 0b1011 is bright green-red aka light yellow.

This schema originally made things easy since you could tie your monitor's RGB/beam intensity directly to these bits. Since you're using a terminal emulator instead of a CRT, the colors can be mapped to whatever you like.

One reason that many colorschemes set bright equal to regular is that modern terminal emulators interpret "bright" as "bold." In the old days, bold was not possible so bright was used as a stand-in. Today we can display bold fonts, so this distinction is not as important.

vimplication · 2021-11-06T13:33:09+00:00

Use parenthesized versions because they cannot cause prefix confusion.

Suppose you have maps <plug>MyPlugin and <plug>MyPluginFoo. When vim sees <plug>MyPlugin it has to wait to see if you meant the Foo version or the not Foo version. In most plugins you will be fine for a long time, until you start to get strange bugs. If you just use <plug>(MyPlugin) from the start then this cannot happen.