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This wiki is about Vim, an open-source, powerful and configurable text editor. We aim to exchange tips and tricks with other Vim users. Please help by improving or adding comments to any tip.

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Featured tip view archive

When writing a program it can be convenient if closing brackets are automatically inserted. For example, after typing { it can be handy if the closing } is added automatically.

Our featured tip discusses solutions for this problem: some simple mappings are provided and their shortcomings outlined. More advanced solutions require a plugin, and a list of scripts for the automatic insertion of matching brackets is provided.

Did you know? view archive

• The Vim FAQ is online.
• There are several methods to change the indentation of a block of lines.
• A mapping can change the Home key to move to the first character, or the first that is nonblank.
• Filtering and redirection can capture output from Vim or external programs.
• It's easy to change between backslash and forward slash in a file path.
• If you create your own tags file, you can jump to the correct line and column.
• If you work with many files, it's easy to save them all with :wa or :xa.
• Simple substitutes or a Perl script can convert text using HTML entities like >.
• The command :g/^/exe ".w ".line(".").".txt" saves each line in the buffer to a separate file.
• :g// lists all lines containing the last search pattern, and :redir will capture the results.
• With set browsedir=buffer the File, Open dialog defaults to the current file's directory.

From Vim Help view archive

• You can have Vim try to detect whether to ignore case in searches. :help 'smartcase'
• Toggle an option by adding ! (set spell! will turn spell checking on/off). :help :set
• With set, use += to add option flags, ^= to add them at the beginning, or -= to remove them. :help add-option-flags, :help set-option