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Derek Wyatt's Blog

Vim, OO Design and Piles of Uselessness

Well, I just updated to the latest BoinxTV (a beta release, in fact) and some problems that I was having earlier appear to have disappeared! Things are much more stable now – in fact, I don’t see any flaws anymore at all and I have just completed my first video with it, which should be uploaded soon.

I got BoinxTV as part of MacHeist 3 so this was a serious deal and for the moment, I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve been trying to put together the next Vim video most of the day. It’s actually going to be the prequel video that introduces Vim. To do it, I’ve dusted off my copy of BoinxTV that I got from the last Macheist and, while a very cool app, it’s causing me some issues that I’m trying to get worked out with the Boinx guys. Hopefully it will be solved soon so that I can get back to publishing these things. I’ve had a very busy month that made it very difficult to do anything but work, travel and take care of my adorable little two year old :). I got to clean up strawberry juice out of the carpet today and of course, the poop – oh the poop…

So this video will attempt to truly introduce Vim and give a springboard to the novice videos. Once that’s in the can I’ll move on to continue where we left off by describing how to install plugins and work with file types. We need to start looking at Vim’s extensibility through plugins and so I need to lay some foundation for that.

I’ve managed to finally get a video up on working with Vim windows. You can check it out at:

I’ve re-recorded Basic Editing 1 & 2 for Vim to align better with how I’ve been doing things lately and to make them more clear. You can check them out at:

I saw this cute little post on Twitter in the #vim section and was intrigued. It’s a pretty neat representation of the keyboard mappings within Vim. You never know – it just might be what you’re looking for. The link is here.

I surf a lot on my BlackBerry and my own website was brutal for it. I tried a ton of themes and was completely disappointed. All I had to do was install the Wordpress Mobile Pack and Voila!

Wordpress… Why did I ever try to build a website from scratch? This thing’s got everything!

I had to redo the Working with Many Files (Screencast 1) video because there was some weird audio encoding problem with it that Vimeo just wasn’t happy dealing with. But, at any rate, it appears to work correctly now!

Have a look at Working with Many Files (Screencast 1).

The second video about Working with Multiple Files is now online. Vimeo is still converting Screencast 1, even though I uploaded that one first – it’s been a really lucky day for me today :). Hopefully that one will be done soon. This video covers:

  • The args list, and moving through it.
  • The buffer list, and moving through it.
  • The bufdo command and touches on its super powers.

These are all in support of running Just One Vim.

I saw this on Twitter:

From: @jyurek
Sent: 27 Aug 2009 10:35

Is there a vim command to go to the end of the current search
highlight? Like e for words, but for search matches.
#vim #lazytweet

I found it quite interesting and didn’t have an “out of the box” Vim answer to this. So I crafted the following answer:

:nmap <silent> <c-e> /<c-r>//e<cr>:let @/='<c-r>/'<cr>

And that seems to work. Essentially you hit CTRL-e and that starts another search exactly like your previous search but puts the cursor at the end of it, then puts the original search back in the search register so that ‘n’ and ‘N’ work as expected.

I just found this cool cheat sheet for Vim that some folks may find helpful: The Vim Cheat Sheet.