Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Hacking Vim
Kim Schulz, Hacking Vim, Packt Publishing
Pact Vim book page
This is the newest book on Vim and right now the only one that
deals with Vim 7. In case you were wondering, Vim is a text and
code editor that is available on most every platform. It is a
development of the venerable Vi editor and has featured in the Vi vs
Emacs religious wars.
In fact I was a keen Emacs user myself but these days, on my
tiny weird Linux machine, I use Vim because it is useful and
extensible and Emacs is not. I've become quite a fan as well and this
book is aimed precisely at the likes of me - someone who knows their
way around but is not a guru and is interested in new tricks and
better ways to get things done.
The book starts off with a history of Vi and Vi-alikes, then goes
on to personalisation - changing fonts, colours, highlighting, the
status line, and more. Then we're onto better navigation - moving by
paragraph and sentence and the like and ways of movement in code
files - which includes a key mapping for solving the long line
problem. There's heaps more - dealing with tags; macro recording;
folding; using vimdiff; scripting; games; and an index to make random
access easier.
My only complaint about the book is that a couple of the code
examples didn't work for me. The first was part of the status line
code and the second had to do with folding.
Anyway, if all that sounds like fun, then this book is certainly for you and
as a plus, there is a donation made to Ugandan orphans for each book
sold.
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here