I’ve been using (neo)vim as my main IDE for the last several years. If you’re interested in my config, you can find it here. These are some tricks that I’ve picked up from using vim.
Wrap lines
Sometimes, I’ll write long-form content in vim (like this blog). It gets a lot easier to edit if you use:
:set wrap
To undo it:
:set nowrap
Visual block mode
Deletion
You can use Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode. This is useful when you want to delete several part of consecutive lines. For example, given the text:
1. asd visual block example
2. asd a second line
3. asd more text here
Place your cursor on the “a” in the first “asd”. Enter visual block mode with Ctrl-v. Select the entireword with e. Select the next two lines and the space in between with jjl. Then you can delete across multiple lines with x!
We’re left with:
1. visual block example
2. a second line
3. more text here
Insertion
You can also insert onto several consecutive lines. Again, use Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode. Then I (shift-i) to enter insert mode. Once you’ve added your text, press Esc or Ctrl-[ to propogate it to all selected blocks. Note, that i won’t get you into insert-mode here, it needs to be I.
Move split to tab
To move a split to its own tab you can use Ctrl-w T.