Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor: From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users (Paperback)

by Kim Schulz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users

• Create, install, and use Vim scripts
• Personalize your work-area
• Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive

In Detail

Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

What you will learn from this book?

Chapter 1 introduces Vim and a few well-known relatives; their history and relation to vi is briefly described.

Chapter 2 introduces how to make Vim a better editor for you by modifying it for your personal needs. It shows us ways of modifying fonts, the color scheme, the status line, menus, and toolbar.

Chapter 3 introduces some of the ways in which Vim helps us to navigate through files easily. It explains an alternative way for boosting navigation through files and buffers in Vim.

Chapter 4 introduces you to features in Vim. It describes how to use templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers.

Chapter 5 introduces simple tricks to format text and code. It also discusses how external tools can be used to give Vim just that extra edge it needs to be the perfect editor.

Chapter 6 is especially for those who want to learn how to extend Vim with scripts. The chapter introduces scripting basics, how to use and install/uninstall scripts, debugging scripts, and lots more.

Appendix A has a listing of games that have been implemented with Vim scripting; it also provides an overview of chat and mail scripts and has a section on using Vim as an IDE.

Appendix B shows how to keep your Vim configuration files well organized and how to retain your Vim configuration across computers by storing a copy of it online.

Approach

This is a cookbook packed with ready-to-use hacks that give solutions for some of the commonest problems users of the Vim editor encounter during their daily use. Each recipe follows a systematic approach with a self-contained description of the task it covers, how to use it, and what you gain by using it. The reader can read any of the hacks in this book without having to read any of the other hacks-where necessary they include cross-references to other relevant hacks. The minimum version of Vim required for each hack is clearly indicated.

Who this book is written for?

Anyone who has worked with Vim and wants to get more out of this legendary text editor can use the hacks from this book. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users.

About the Author

Kim Schulz

Kim Schulz has an M.Sc. in Software Engineering from Aalborg University in Denmark. He has been an active developer in the Linux and Open Source communities since 1997 and has worked with everything from translation and bug fixing to producing full-blown software systems. This entire time, Vim has been Kim's editor of choice and it has been the first thing he installs whenever he sits by a new computer. Today Kim works as a full-time software engineer at CSR Plc. developing software for the next generation wireless technologies. A lot of Kim's spare time has been spent on developing the open-source CMS Fundanemt. This has lead to him now owning the web-hosting company Devteam Denmark that specializes in hosting and development of Fundanemt-based websites.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (May 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847190936
• ISBN-13: 978-1847190932
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #394,909 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very good book on Vim, August 6, 2007

By	Noah Spurrier (SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I like this book. It is concise. It assumes that you are probably comfortable with Vim, but want to get more out of Vim. You can easily skip around and browse difference recipes. I also like the fact that it packs in a lot of info in a slim volume. So many authors tend to give too much detail. I like a book like this because
it gives you enough to get you started and no more.

The only downside of this book is that it's $40 for 210 pages. I think that pretty pricey even in the over-priced world of technical books. If this book were $10 I would buy copies for my friends. If this book were $20 I would buy it without reservations. If this book were $30 then I would not be complaining about the price.
But at $40 I'm tempted to say that someone who is moderately motivated could probably save their money and use :h and the vimtips.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor reference. Maybe good for beginners+., August 15, 2007

By	Ted Pavlic (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book sells itself as a cookbook for Vim experts. However, it reads like it is written for a juvenile audience that has only recently opened Vim a few times. At points where the book starts to get interesting, it refers the reader to Vim help docs.

Its table of contents is longer (4 pages, two front and two back) than its index (3 pages, two front and one back). I expected to be able to pick this book up and use it as a Vim7 reference. This really isn't possible with this book.

This book has merit, but it's overpriced, and it isn't what it claims to be. Someone needs to write a complete and updated Vim reference. For now, this book mind remind you of a few cool features of Vim, but it will not change your world.

Personally, I get more out of the Vim quick reference cards I have taped around my desk.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but needs more practica information, October 28, 2007

By	Craig Maloney (MI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Throughout the years, there have been many clones and re-implementations of the venerable vi editor. One variant of vi that emerged and stayed with us is VIM. Since it's introduction, VIM has proven itself a worthy successor to the traditional vi editor. VIM has rightfully taken the place of standard vi implementations as the spiritual successor to vi, completely replacing the vi editor on many, if not all of the current Linux distributions. Many improvements have been made to VIM such as tabs, spell checking, folding, and many, many more. However many of these new enhancements may still remain hidden to anyone who isn't keeping up on the cutting edge of VIM development. Hacking VIM is a good resource for becoming more familiar with the new features of VIM and how to make them work best for you.

Hacking VIM is a short book, weighing in at a scant 210 pages. The book contains six chapters, and two appendices. The first chapter covers the history of VIM, and the lineage of vi clones that preceded it. Chapter 2 covers personalizing VIM. This chapter covers how to really take VIM and customize it for your own needs, from changing the fonts and colors for GVIM to personalizing the status bar, and using tabs. Chapter 3 deals with navigating better in VIM, whether it's in a singular file, or a group of files (which is especially important for several programming environments). Chapter 4 discusses the many productivity enhancements of VIM, such as templates, auto-completion, code folding, sessions, and the built in diff mode. Advanced formatting is covered in chapter 5, which has a few interesting tips on making code look better. Rounding out the book (and weighing in as the largest chapter of the book) is scripting VIM. VIM has excellent scripting capabilities, and this chapter covers them in great detail, from finding scripts to writing your own. Lastly, the Appendix covers some of the neat scripts available for VIM, such as a minesweeper game, and the obligatory Towers of Hanoi puzzle and mail client (because no software is considered done until it reads mail and news. :) )

Hacking VIM prefaces each tip with which version of VIM will work with each function. There were only a few instances where I noticed that a particular function was mis-marked as requiring a later version of VIM that actually worked with earlier versions. The book also contains good images which help demonstrate some of the more visual components of VIM, like tabs, folding, and the spell checker.

Hacking VIM is chock-full of useful tips for getting the most out of VIM. The book is aimed at those who have already gained some familiarity with the VIM editor, and is by no means a tutorial for the novice user. There is clearly a bias in this book to the intermediate and advanced VIM users. Unfortunately, this is at odds with the first chapter, which starts with a history of the VIM editor. This wastes some of the space of the book, and would have been best used with more unique and different tips. Also, having some experience with VIM, I found certain tips weren't worth the trouble, and others quite confusing. The section on signs was a bit confusing, and I'm still unclear on why they're worth the trouble. There were several instances where I wondered what the productive benefit of a tip would be. On the other hand, I did find several tips invaluable. It's easy to overlook new functions in the CHANGELOGs, so I missed that newer versions of VIM had integrated spell-checking. Overall, Hacking VIM had enough good tips in it that I hadn't discovered on my own to make it worth the read.

Like most editors, VIM can induce editor fiddling sessions that result in little work being done, and Hacking VIM contains lots of fodder to make even the most ardent tweaker happy. Unless you carefully follow the mailing lists for VIM, and try every new feature as it is released, you might miss some really helpful productivity enhancers. My only wish for this book would be more focus on really productive tips, and less history about the other versions of vi that didn't survive. Hacking VIM may have lots of "of course" items for the truly seasoned VIM user, but for those of us who don't keep up-to-date with the latest features, Hacking VIM is an excellent way to get more familiar with some of the truly great features that have been introduced in later VIM versions.