vim posts

Vim terminal mode config

Vim has a couple ways to run terminal commands from the editor. From ex command mode, :! will allow running a single command before breaking back to Vim, while :term will open a new terminal window within Vim, by default in a split, to run as many commands as you want. There are several settings in my vimrc that I add to make working with these terminal modes easier and nicer. I will share some of them below.

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:wq Bram Moolenaar

Sad to hear of Bram Moolenaar’s recent death. RIP. He was the creator and main developer of vim, the common and influential *NIX text editor. I encountered the editor in the early aughts from a CS professor who used it and was very quick with it. I’ve used it over the years on Linux servers, where it is one of the few command line editors always installed. It has a learning curve, but I’ve gotten comfortable with it over the years. With the death of the Atom editor, I’ve been moving toward vim as my primary editor.

Bram continued to steer the development of the editor up to its death, so it will be interesting to see where it goes without him. Some complained he kept the editor from modern features, resulting in a fork called neovim. We’ll see if vim modernizes more without Bram, if the project slows or dies without him, if neovim takes over, or if perhaps some efforts to re-merge the projects are made.


Vim autocomplete setup

After hours of playing and learning some details of vimscript, I have improved the autocomplete in vim almost to where I like it. I’ve made it work more like some GUI editors, eg Sublime and Atom, where it pops open automatically as I type and I can tab to apply the selected choice or otherwise type on and ignore it, and otherwise clean up the experience. The main thing I would like to add is fuzzy matching. I’d also like it to match more in-document words and work for more unknown file-types in a generic way.

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