7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0

Summary

Bram Moolenaar’s presentation argues that small improvements to text-editing habits can save time and reduce errors. His method is to notice repeated or inefficient work, find a faster editor feature or workflow, and practice it until it becomes automatic. Rather than learning every command in advance, he recommends improving gradually as specific needs arise.

Vim techniques demonstrated

1. Find every occurrence of a word quickly

   • Enable search highlighting so matches remain visible.
   • Press * on a word to search for its other occurrences and get an overview of where it appears.
   • Moolenaar recommends keeping highlighting enabled and using the command repeatedly until it becomes habitual.

2. Reduce typing with completion

   • In insert mode, Ctrl-N completes a word based on text in the file. This helps with long or easily mistyped names.
   • Vim 7’s omni-completion uses context—such as a variable’s type and structure members—to offer more relevant completions.
   • Omni-completion is language-dependent and can be confused by constructs such as C preprocessors. For C, it can rely on tag files; very large tag files may slow searches for members.

3. Catch spelling errors and recurring typos

   • Vim’s spell checker highlights likely mistakes and offers corrections. The talk notes support for roughly 30 languages.
   • For habitual typos, define abbreviations that automatically replace common misspellings as you type. Users need to build and maintain their own typo lists.

4. Navigate unfamiliar code

   • Generate a recursive ctags file for a project and use tags to jump to definitions. Tags locate definitions but generally do not show all uses.
   • Use grep or cscope to find references and call sites. Vim’s quickfix list and window let users review search results and jump to each location.
   • Other navigation tools include gf, which opens the filename under the cursor, and [i, which searches for a name in included header files. Setting Vim’s path option correctly helps these commands find files.
   • Folding, introduced in Vim 6, can collapse code regions to make file structure easier to scan.

5. Edit prose in Vim

   • For documents with markup or formatting, Moolenaar suggests drafting in Vim with automatic text wrapping disabled while display wrapping and line breaking are enabled. Paragraphs remain single long lines in the file but appear wrapped on screen.
   • Text can then be copied into another editor, though formatting such as bold and underlining will not carry over.

6. Filter noisy tool output

   • To work through long lint output, write a Vim function or command that removes known irrelevant warnings, then load the remaining errors into the quickfix list with :cfile.
   • Filtering patterns need care: removing too much could hide real issues, and the rules may need updates as tools or libraries change.

7. Build the habit of improving

   • The final habit is a meta-habit: regularly review what you did over the last few minutes and ask what could be faster or safer.
   • Learn commands as problems arise, using Vim’s help, documentation, mailing-list archives, colleagues, online examples, or small scripts. Practice a few improvements at a time rather than trying to master the entire manual at once.

Moolenaar also recommends automatic indentation for suitable languages, noting that Python is different because indentation affects program meaning.

Guides, resources, and other topics

• Vim’s built-in user manual and quick reference are recommended for learning features.
• The Vim users mailing list and its archives are useful places to find answers and tips. Moolenaar advises asking clearly phrased questions.
• The talk mentions Steve Wallin’s beginner-oriented Vim book as a source used in the Vim 7 manual.
• In the Q&A, Moolenaar distinguishes viminfo, which preserves items such as command and search history, from sessions, which can save a working setup using :mksession.
• He describes tabs and windows as organization options whose usefulness depends on screen size and workflow. He also discusses the challenges of embedding Vim in IDEs and mentions Archida, a Python bridge between Vim and GDB, as an existing but difficult-to-install debugging integration.

Main speaker and sources

• Main speaker: Bram Moolenaar, Vim’s creator and maintainer.
• Other sources mentioned: Vim’s built-in help and mailing-list community; Steve Wallin’s Vim book; and tools including ctags, cscope, grep, and GDB.