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Featured tip for May view archive

Many Vim users prefer working with commands rather than complex key sequences, because commands can be remembered. A frequently-used command can be mapped to any key you like.

You can create user-defined commands, but each must start with an uppercase letter. So how do you replace a built-in command with a user-defined command? Here is a clever but simple technique to replace built-in commands, while avoiding accidental cabbrev expansions.

See Featured Tips for more, or to nominate a featured tip.

Did you know? view archive

• A user-defined command can evaluate :Calc sin(pi/2).
• It's sometimes better to not use the slash delimiter for :s/old/new/.
• You can drag & drop one or more files into gvim.
• Use register @/ to execute commands without changing the search register.
• You can map a key to <Nop> to disable an unwanted key.
• When substituting, the replacement can be the result of an expression.
• With a good regex, you can change all HTML tags to lowercase.
• input() can read an HTML tag to wrap around a visual selection.
• Use vat to select a tag block, then da> to delete the tags.
• Vim can display a lot more than ASCII characters!

From Vim Help view archive

• :verbose abbreviate lists each abbreviation and where it was defined. :help :abbreviate-verbose
• Avoid an insert-mode abbreviation by pressing Ctrl-V (or Ctrl-Q if you use Ctrl-V for paste) before the character after the abbreviation. :help abbreviations
• Setting the 'display' option to include "lastline" will show as much of the final (wrapped) line as will fit on the screen. :help 'display'

Other pages

• Vim documentation
• Notes on the import of tips from vim.org
• Using Vim to edit tips