Vim Tips Wiki talk:Featured Tip

Procedure

1. 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.
2. 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 ~~~~.
3. After a time (about once a month) we will update the article to reflect a new tip.
4. 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.
5. Start over!

Criteria

Please nominate any tip that you think is worthwhile, but we won't feature a tip until it meets these criteria:

1. 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.
2. Clean tip. It is free of grammatical and spelling errors, the information is correct and up-to-date, etc.
3. Has not been featured before. We have an historic tip section in the article for that.

Current nominations

Does anyone have a view on what featured tips should be next? If so, make a list here, in your preferred order. If you have a feeling about the month, include that.

• March Search for visually selected text • discussion
• Deferred -- see discussion Different syntax highlighting within regions of a file • discussion

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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

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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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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Deferred nominations

Different syntax highlighting within regions of a file

These issues need to be fixed before this tip can be featured:

• Still has {{review}} template.
• Text is somewhat broken (e.g. "sections on a web page..." is in first box, and points "3" and "4" are displayed.
• There are too many comments. We don't have to merge them all, but we can't feature a tip where the first comment suggests something is not working.

--JohnBeckett 03:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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The change by Drmikehenry to unlet b:current_syntax seems to have fixed the problems with this tip. I haven't been able ot reproduce any of them (at least not when unletting). So I think this could be featured once cleaned up.

--BenArmston 23:50, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

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