Vim Tips Wiki

Welcome to the Vim Tips wiki

This wiki is about the editor Vim. We aim to exchange tips and tricks with other Vim users. Please help by improving or adding comments to any tip.

If you are new to Vim, we have plenty of tips that will help you get started.

We are currently editing over 1,598 articles.

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Featured tip for November view archive

Programmers often need to convert numbers from hexadecimal to decimal, or vice versa. You can simply enter a command like :echo 0x1234 to display the decimal equivalent of hex 1234, or enter :echo printf('%x',1234) to display the hex equivalent of decimal 1234.

For more serious converting, our user-defined command :Dec2hex converts all decimal numbers in a selected area to hex, and :Hex2dec does the reverse.

Our featured tip has the details, as well as links to tips showing how to display or edit binary files in hex. A method to convert the current line to or from percent-encoded hex is also provided.

Did you know? view archive

• Vim tutorials has videos illustrating simple and advanced topics.
• On Windows, when using PuTTY to execute Vim, you should disable application keypad mode.
• Enter :scriptnames to list all scripts run by Vim.
• Using :execute allows '|' to separate multiple commands, even those that that eat '|'.
• Entering :m'}-1 moves the current line to the end of the current paragraph.
• You can see what script defined a mapping (say for comma) with :verbose map ,.
• Using :noautocmd vimgrep ... will speed up vimgrep.
• Under Windows, enter :!start calc to asynchronously execute a GUI program (say calc.exe).
• In a script, execute normal-mode commands with a bang (example: normal! gqip) to avoid mappings.
• Scripts can use filereadable() to check if a file exists and can be read (example).
• Scripts can use readfile() to read all lines from a file (same example).

From Vim Help view archive

• The built-in printf() supports strings and numbers, including floating point. :help printf()
• Substitute can replace matches with an evaluated expression: :s/.../\=.../. :help sub-replace-expression
• In :s/.../\=.../ the expression can use submatch(0) to get the matched text. :help submatch()

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