Personally, I’m not a frequent user of debuggers. Most of the projects and code that I am involved with is easily debugged with good old “die(‘here’)”. But if you are looking for some help on how to use Vim with a debugger, have a look at the “Debugging in Vim” blog post.
Intermediate Vim is a nice collection of Vim tips and tricks, which are aimed at somebody who is already familiar with Vim. (There is of course no single definition of what’s advanced, intermediate or introductory, so we’ll leave that argument out.) But the article is well worth the read, even if you already know all of the mentioned commands. A refresher is always welcome.
There are many different configuration bundles for Vim, which easy the discovery, installation, configuration, and documentation of different plugins and features of this powerful text editor. SpaceVim is yet another one of these.
If you are new to Vim, or have grown tired of trying to tweak it to your liking, please give it a try. It might just work for all your needs.
Learning Vim is an endless process. Even after using it for two decades I still keep discovering new settings, features, and plugins that significantly improve my productivity.
The other day I came across “Ask HN: Best things in your bash_profile/aliases?” thread, with plenty of tips and tricks. One particular comment highlighted a feature that I kind of heard about but never got to setting up – persistent undo.
It turns out that starting with Vim 7.3 you can preserve the undo history between editing sessions. Which means that you make changes to a file, save it, close it, and when you reopen it later, you can press ‘u’ to undo the changes you’ve done during the last edit.
In order to set this up, you first need to create a folder, where Vim will store the undo history files. For example:
$ mkdir ~/.vim/undodir
Then, you need tell Vim that you want to use persistent undo and where to store the files. Edit the .vimrc file and add the following:
set undofile
set undodir=~/.vim/undodir
As long as you are using Vim 7.3 or newer and the directory exists, your persistent undo history will work like a charm.
Read the rest of the thread for more tips on how to clean it up periodically, and how to further improve your experience with Vim’s undo, using plugins that help navigate the undo tree.
The Ultimate Plumber, or up for short, is an excellent interactive tool for anyone who is building complex command sequences for processing text on the Linux command line. If you are a frequent user of grep, sort, cut, awk, sed, and other similar commands, have a look at this demo. I’m sure up will save a tonne of time once you get a hang of it.