Vim Tips Wiki talk:Featured Tip
From Vim Tips Wiki
Contents |
[edit] General comments
[edit] Procedure
- Collect nominations from anyone who wants to add to this page. Please follow the format of other nominations, with a section header that links to the tip, followed by some comments on the pros and cons of the tip.
- Collect input on these tips from anyone. We're going for consensus, not a strict vote. Add to the Pros or Cons or comments below the tip heading. Start with ---- to create a horizontal rule, write your comments, and sign with ~~~~.
- After a time (about once a month) we will update the article to reflect a new tip.
- When the article is updated, the current tip will be moved to the 'Previously featured tips' section, and will be removed from this talk page. Old discussion for other tips will remain.
- Start over!
[edit] Comments on procedure
[edit] Criteria
Please nominate any tip that you think is worthwhile, but we won't feature a tip until it meets these criteria:
- Reviewed tip. If it is an imported tip, someone has merged comments, checked content, etc. and removed the {{review}} tag. If it is a new tip, it has been discussed, kept, and received the {{TipNew}} template.
- Clean tip. It is free of grammatical and spelling errors, the information is correct and up-to-date, etc.
- Has not been featured before. We have an historic tip section in the article for that.
[edit] Comments on criteria
[edit] Current nominations
- October Highlight unwanted spaces • discussion
- November Highlight long lines • discussion
- Deferred -- see discussion Different syntax highlighting within regions of a file • discussion
September
- I have merged 928 Command-line window to 45 Using command-line history.
- Mmmm...I like it. Ready to feature, I say! --Fritzophrenic 12:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
- I will feature 45 in September (and so have removed its nomination from here). --JohnBeckett 23:43, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
- Fritzophrenic said: "I'd change the old title to a redirect if you do merge them."
- I have changed 928 to "Merged 45" (i.e. proposed 928 for deletion). I'm very happy to make it a redirect instead, but I made it "merged" for the moment because it occurred to me that the only reason for having it as a redirect is so people can type "command line window" to go to that page, so if 928 is kept, I'm wondering whether it should be renamed to remove the "-". The Wikipedia way would be to make all possible redirects (with and without the '-'), but I would prefer to avoid that complexity until we've got more of the tips under control.
- Also, I'm wondering if 45 should just be "Command-line history" or the possibly less syntactically correct "Command line history". What do you think?
- I think "Using command-line history" is good enough, fairly easy to remember, and readily found by a search. No need to screw up anyone's links or bookmarks! --Fritzophrenic 12:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
- The reason I want to change 928 to a redirect is that, although the merged template tells you to go to the new tip for the old content, once the page is deleted this information goes away. Since this tip is nice and clean, well-written, and reviewed, I imagine the chances of people linking to it or bookmarking it are fairly high. How would you like to access one of your bookmarks to a wiki one day, only to find that the page has been deleted? Especially if the content is actually available elsewhere? I view merging a tip as more of a move than a deletion, so I really think it would be good practice to start changing tips to redirects rather than deleting them outright. So, if you do decide to change the tip to a redirect, I think just the old title should do fine. No need to rename it! --Fritzophrenic 12:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
- I have changed 928 so it redirects to 45. In this case, I think it is a good result (because both titles are very reasonable). But I would want to consider each "merged" on a case-by-case basis rather than switching to a "keep all titles" policy. Maybe I'll cool down and see reason later, but at the moment I'm quite irritated about the enormous ammount of rubbish we still have, and the lack of much sustained assistance (see our todo list). The flurry of edits we're getting is very encouraging, but it's not helping to remove the old junk. As we fix tips, my concern about the old junk actually increases because someone reading the good tips could quite reasonably conclude that advice here is sound. Then they would encounter some dodgy tip with outdated or misguided info and might think it was golden. --JohnBeckett 23:43, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Highlight unwanted spaces
People often want to know how to do this, and the tip is (finally!) in quite good shape.
- JohnBeckett: Let's use this (VimTip396) in October.
- Fritzophrenic: Common enough problem that we should definitely feature it soon, though it is quite a long one.
- Sounds good to me! --Fritzophrenic 12:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Highlight long lines
Mostly I'm nominating this one because of all the work we put into it recently. I am very pleased with the final product. It is easily accessible and provides valuable "how to" guidance, but also provides an easy-to-modify copy-and-paste solution to a common want.
I'll figure out some pros and cons later. --Fritzophrenic 05:13, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
As agreed, tip has been renamed (it was "Highlight text beyond 80 columns"). Let's do this in soon. --JohnBeckett 23:43, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Search for visually selected text
People often want to know how to do this, and the tip is in quite good shape. There is an explanation that should be of interest to intermediate users (although it doesn't cover all points).
- JohnBeckett: This tip (VimTip171) is good enough to use whenever we want.
- Fritzophrenic: Good, but too much of a "here's a script" tip for my taste.
[edit] Easy pasting to Windows applications
Pros:
- Shows use of a somewhat obscure option to integrate Vim with the system clipboard
Cons:
- Not sure if it works outside Windows, but it might
- Specific problem that many would love a solution to, but probably won't think to search for it
Somebody should see if this works outside of just Windows. If so, we should rename the tip and feature it right away! This is a very useful feature in Windows.
--Fritzophrenic 22:09, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Maybe merge this tip to Accessing the system clipboard and feature that one instead.
--Fritzophrenic 21:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Should probably merge all tips about the system clipboard and feature the result. -- J. Beckett
I've just tested this under the X windowing system (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, X.Org 7.2.5) and it works there too.
BenArmston 09:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Match every word except foo
Pros:
- introduction to a fairly obscure search method: zero-width matches
- very powerful method that most people probably don't know about, but will use once they do
- good explanation of advanced search technique
Cons:
- Fairly simple tip
- Already "featured" in the "did you know?" section
I'm a little unsure about this one, because we don't want to feature every single tip about less frequently used search atoms, but then again, I would never have learned most of those obscure search methods without stumbling upon tips such as this one. I think we should feature at least a few of these tips, but we need to pick and choose carefully.
--Fritzophrenic 22:09, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to suggest that we remove the nomination for this tip. We already featured it in a way by putting it on the "did you know" page. Unless we start doing an actual "featured content" thing like was suggested in the mailing list, I think that the "did you know" is plenty of featuring for such a simple tip. This still is a great tip! It is just too simple to make a full feature out of I think.
--Fritzophrenic 23:25, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] File no longer available - mark buffer modified
Pros:
- Brand-new tip, so we know it will be clean once accepted
- Straight from vim_use, tested by many (and maybe promotes vim_use?)
- Great example of using autocmds to solve a common problem
- Showcases FileChangedShell event, which probably very few people use
- Showcases ":echomsg" and ":echohl" commands, which are also probably used infrequently but very useful for scripts
- Should be platform-independent
Cons:
- Still only a "proposed" tip
- Won't work with older Vim versions
I love this tip! The discussion on vim_use that spawned it greatly expanded my Vim knowledge. I think we should share it with others.
--Fritzophrenic 13:16, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Deferred nominations
[edit] Best Vim Tips
Pros:
- Overview of MANY useful things in Vim.
Cons:
- There may be a bit too much info here - it could be overwhelming to some users.
- Bit too waffly?
- Needs too much work to clean up.
--JohnBeckett 01:21, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm thinking this might be a good tip to feature sometime, but not now. It's a great whirlwind overview of many, many things you can do in Vim, but is a bit hard to follow at times, and has way too many comments at the moment. Let's fix this one up and then maybe feature it afterwards.
--Fritzophrenic 19:13, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Different syntax highlighting within regions of a file
Pros:
- Very useful tip - syntax highlight the same file different ways in different places!
- Explains concept with simple example, then goes into more useful/more advanced versatile function
Cons:
- Still needs cleaning.
- Somewhat advanced topic.
- Very specific, probably not very common problem
I think we should clean this one up and feature it really soon! I found this tip at random, and used it right away to make an addition to the wikipedia syntax highlighting to include Vim syntax within pre sections. This tip is a must-have for your arsenal if you like to tweak syntax highlighting. It also indirectly illustrates a few other syntax highlighting concepts.
--Fritzophrenic 22:09, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be some reliability problems with this tip: there is a comment in the tip stating that it didn't work for the commenter, and I wasn't able to get it to work either (the generic syntax highlighting of the file was removed but non took it's place). Before this tip is featured we should make sure that it works reliably.
--BenArmston 21:30, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, interesting. I didn't actually use the function in the tip because I only needed it once (I just used the concept), so let's wait on this one.
--Fritzophrenic 12:47, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
