Vim Tips Wiki:Community Portal

This is the starting point for all editors of the Vim Tips wiki.

• Please see our policy introduction for how-to information.
• To follow changes to this wiki, and to look for new events and problem edits, use recent changes.
• To discuss a tip, please edit the tip page and add to the Comments at the bottom (see the discussion guidelines for why we avoid the discussion pages for tips).
• On other pages (for example, this page), you are welcome to edit the discussion page to talk about the content.
• If you want help editing, you could start with the tutorial on the Central Wikia, or see our editing help.
• There are more help pages in the help category.
• And even more on wikimedia.org

More about the Vim community can be found at vim.org.

Asking questions

On this wiki, we discuss how to improve tips, but we don't discuss how to use Vim.

Questions about Vim should be sent to the Vim mailing list. The newsgroup comp.editors also discusses Vim – see its Google Groups archive. IRC users should join the #vim channel on the Freenode network, server irc.freenode.net.

Questions about the Vim Tips wiki are best discussed on the vim-l mailing list. You are also welcome to edit the Talk (Discussion) page of any active user. You could view the recent changes, and click any blue Talk link (blue links refer to pages which exist), or edit the talk page of any active user.

We don't encourage questions about using Vim on the wiki because they distract from our work of improving the tip collection. In addition, while there are currently only a handful of active maintainers on the wiki, the mailing list, newsgroup and IRC channel listed above have thousands of active members who can all offer good support for Vim.

With all this in mind, you are welcome to add a comment to the bottom of a tip pointing out any deficiencies that you have found in the content of the tip (please don't use the talk pages).

Creating a screenshot

It's usually best to use text to explain your problem (Vim users generally like text!). However, you may occasionally need to make a screenshot to illustrate a bug, make a feature request, or demonstrate some point.

Use the following instructions for your platform.

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Linux (Ubuntu)

Be sure to save the screenshot as a PNG.

Upload the image somewhere, such as Flickr or Imagebin, and provide the URL in your post to the mailing list.

Downloading tips

There is no good way to download all tips because:

• Any download will become out of date when tips are improved on the wiki.
• Tips are stored as "wikitext" which can be downloaded but is not intended for reading.
• There is no simple procedure to obtain files with a clean html version of each tip.
• Links in downloaded files will not work.

A tool like wget can be used to download the wikitext for individual tips. For example, the following creates file 1.wik containing the wikitext for Searching:

wget -O 1.wik "http://vim.wikia.com/index.php?action=raw&title=Searching"

Wikia periodically creates database dumps with a snapshot of the entire Vim Tips wiki in xml format. Each dump contains all tips, templates, user pages, talk pages, and more. Image files and deleted pages are not included. Two dumps (gz compressed files) are available:

• pages_current.xml.gz – The most-recent revision of each page.
• pages_full.xml.gz – All revisions of each page.

Links to download each file are at the bottom of Special:Statistics. In November 2009, the current dump is under 2MB (expands to 7MB), and the full dump is 6MB (expands to 67MB). If MediaWiki is installed (on Linux), either dump can be imported so you have a local web server that displays the html for all Vim tips, with working links.

It is possible to download an xml file containing the wikitext of specified pages. At Special pages, choose Export pages. For example, you could enter "Searching" in the Add pages from category box, then click the Add button, then click the Export button. The result will be an xml file (not compressed) with each page in Category:Searching.

Mirror Sites

http://broom9.com/Vim_Tips_Wiki (China)