Rocky rockyzhang24

Vim: pushing built-in features beyond their limits

The situation

Searching can be an efficient way to navigate the current buffer.

The first search commands we learn are usually / and ?. These are seriously cool, especially with the incsearch option enabled which lets us keep typing to refine our search pattern. / and ? really shine when all we want is to jump to something we already have our eyeballs on but they are not fit for every situation:

when we want to search something that's not directly there, those two commands can make us lose context very quickly,
when we need to compare the matches.

Hyperlinks (a.k.a. HTML-like anchors) in terminal emulators

[ Update 2025-03-24: Commenting is disabled permanently. Previous comments are archived at web.archive.org. ]

Most of the terminal emulators auto-detect when a URL appears onscreen and allow to conveniently open them (e.g. via Ctrl+click or Cmd+click, or the right click menu).

It was, however, not possible until now for arbitrary text to point to URLs, just as on webpages.

Redirect the output of a Vim or external command into a scratch buffer

Usage (any shell)

Show full output of command :hi in scratch window:

:Redir hi

Show full output of command :!ls -al in scratch window:

My Vim-related gists

Long-form

This notes is written by Sheldon. You can find me with #iOSBySheldon in Github, Youtube, Facebook, etc.

Need

Convert .mov/.MP4 to .gif

Reason

As a developer, I feel better to upload a short video when I create the pull request to show other viewers what I did in this PR. I tried .mov format directly got after finishing recording screen using Quicktime, however, gif offers preview in most web pages, and has smaller file size.

This is not limited to developer, anyone has this need can use this method to convert the files.

Linting your code, the vanilla way

You may want a linter plugin to lint your code in Vim but you probably don't need it. At least try the built-in way before jumping on the plugin bandwagon.

Defining `makeprg`

autocmd FileType <filetype> setlocal makeprg=<external command>

This autocommand tells Vim to use <external command> when invoking :make % in a <filetype> buffer. You can add as many similar lines as needed for other languages.

	#!/usr/bin/env sh

	##
	# This is script with usefull tips taken from:
	# https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx
	#
	# install it:
	# curl -sL https://raw.github.com/gist/2275613/hack.sh \| sh
	#

	# There was a day where I have too many color schemes in iTerm2 and I want to remove them all.
	# iTerm2 doesn't have "bulk remove" and it was literally painful to delete them one-by-one.

	# iTerm2 save it's preference in ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist in a binary format
	# What you need to do is basically copy that somewhere, convert to xml and remove color schemes in the xml files.

	$ cd /tmp/
	$ cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist .
	$ plutil -convert xml1 com.googlecode.iterm2.plist
	$ vi com.googlecode.iterm2.plist

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	# vim: set filetype=ruby:
	# b - browse Chrome bookmarks with fzf

	[ $(uname) = Darwin ] \|\| exit 1
	which fzf > /dev/null 2>&1 \|\| brew reinstall --HEAD fzf \|\| exit 1

	/usr/bin/ruby -x "$0" \|
	fzf-tmux -u 30% --ansi --multi --no-hscroll --tiebreak=begin \|
	awk 'BEGIN { FS = "\t" } { print $2 }' \|

	# GIT heart FZF
	# -------------

	is_in_git_repo() {
	git rev-parse HEAD > /dev/null 2>&1
	}

	fzf-down() {
	fzf --height 50% --min-height 20 --border --bind ctrl-/:toggle-preview "$@"
	}