@malin Ooh, that's cool. Hadn't seen that before. BTW the code editor I'm using at work has VI on it and it's already been quite useful. Combined with a macro, the efficiency is wonderful.
@anguslm Nice! Vim's the best. I use it for normal writing and after that everything else feels like breathing sludge.
What's your language?
@malin Java, and yeah, I just finished a small project and decided at the end that I wanted to make all the inputs case invariant by replacing each instance of equals with equalsIgnoreCase. Couldn’t help but smile at how annoying that would have been to do manually.
@anguslm Ah! That's just 'find and replace'. There's a wealth underneath that.
Couple of good ones:
`ci[` = change everything that's inside square bracketsss.
`ca[` = same as above, but also deletes the brackets.
`fA` = go to the next capital A on the line.
`df9` = delete everything from here till you find the number 9.
`dF.` = delete everything from here, backwards, till you find a full stop.
`qrI+{Escape}jq10@r` = listen to me, put a '+' at the start of the line, then do that 10 times
@malin Oh cool, I can get fA df9 and dF. to work, but not the others. With the first one, hitting i exits VIM.
@anguslm ???
How've you installed vim? Which version?
@malin I think i changes it to insert mode rather than completely quitting. What's the format for the ci[ command? ci[ then space then replacement word then enter? or without the space? or something else?
@anguslm Literally you just enter inside some [ brackets ] then type "ci[", and everything inside the brackets goes, and you're in insert mode.
"di[" should delete all inside the brackets.
@malin Ah, you have to be inside the brackets already, I thought it was to take you to the next bracket and then alter it.
@anguslm "f[ci[".
@malin Nice. :D
@anguslm Hey - we should see about Vim golf sometime. It's where people compete to complete a Vim task with the fewest number of keystrokes.
@malin I can see that being useful though, especially if you can have versions like find-and-replace-all-x-in-brackets.
@anguslm It becomes instinctive pretty quickly - like a specialized language.
It works on more than square brackets of course - you can ` ci" ` or ` da' `, and then combine this with on the fly macros, or combine macros together.
Ooh! Also like 50 clipboards. I'm using a version of vim which yanks to the computer's clipboards (Linux has 2), in addition to having its own.
@anguslm Maybe that's what's exiting upon the stroke of "i". Was it really so difficult to exit that people needed a plugin to get out?