Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor

From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users

Create, install, and use Vim scriptsPersonalize your work-area Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive

In Detail

Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

What you will learn from this book?

Chapter 1 introduces Vim and a few well-known relatives; their history and relation to vi is briefly described.

Chapter 2 introduces how to make Vim a better editor for you by modifying it for your personal needs. It shows us ways of modifying fonts, the color scheme, the status line, menus, and toolbar.

Chapter 3 introduces some of the ways in which Vim helps us to navigate through files easily. It explains an alternative way for boosting navigation through files and buffers in Vim.

Chapter 4 introduces you to features in Vim. It describes how to use templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers.

Chapter 5 introduces simple tricks to format text and code. It also discusses how external tools can be used to give Vim just that extra edge it needs to be the perfect editor.

Chapter 6 is especially for those who want to learn how to extend Vim with scripts. The chapter introduces scripting basics, how to use and install/uninstall scripts, debugging scripts, and lots more.

Appendix A has a listing of games that have been implemented with Vim scripting; it also provides an overview of chat and mail scripts and has a section on using Vim as an IDE.

Appendix B shows how to keep your Vim configuration files well organized and how to retain your Vim configuration across computers by storing a copy of it online.

Approach

This is a cookbook packed with ready-to-use hacks that give solutions for some of the commonest problems users of the Vim editor encounter during their daily use. Each recipe follows a systematic approach with a self-contained description of the task it covers, how to use it, and what you gain by using it. The reader can read any of the hacks in this book without having to read any of the other hacks-where necessary they include cross-references to other relevant hacks. The minimum version of Vim required for each hack is clearly indicated.

Who this book is written for?

Anyone who has worked with Vim and wants to get more out of this legendary text editor can use the hacks from this book. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users.

User review
Hacking Vim Review
The book has a good content, well written. I disagree with the price, because the quality of paper used.

User review
Great book on Vim, does exactly what is says,,.
Based on some of the other reviews I thought that this book would be less `technical` than it appeared. Those reviews were clearly wrong. The author does exactly what he says he is going to do. He teaches you productivity technics to help you in your daily vim escapades.

The author makes more advanced techniques in vim easier such as auto-completion, vim scripting, and debugging. One section that I found very useful was one of the first `beginning` sections on vim customizations. In it the author clearly and concisely allows the reader to learn how to customize their vim environment.

The author uses clear and concise language that I believe anyone can understand. He starts with the basics and works to bigger concepts such as the example I gave before. This in my opinion is not a vim complete reference. Rather it is for those who use it as a regular user and want to upgrade their skills to a real Power User. I would highly recommend this to anyone. It really does give you recipes for everyday productivity.

User review
Improving Your Vim Experience
The book `Hacking Vim` provides a number of tips, hints, setup ideas, scripts, functions, and ways of improving the Vim experience. There are many topics covered, from heavy-duty Vim use for programming to cosmetic aspects of Vim set up. Whether you will get enough out of the book to warrant its $39.99 list price tag depends on your current level of Vim usage, but from my experience most Vim users will find something of use.

The book assumes the reader has a generous familiarity with Vim. Hacking Vim is not a Vim instruction manual or tutorial on basic Vim usage. It will tell you how to use some of Vim's more involved or complicated features. It will not instruct you in basic movement and editing skills.

You must be adept enough with Vim to not be afraid to change its settings and or to learn and use more advanced features of the editor. Intermediate and more advanced users of Vim should have no problem getting useful tips from this book. Beginners with Vim will still find useful information, and may grow into understanding other information the book provides, but make sure Vim is something you want to dedicate a significant amount of time to before buying a book like this.

The book is written in a rather concise style, though the 'tell them what you'll tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them' format is a little pedantic. Part of the book is used to tell the history of Vim, vi, and other vi-like editors, which is marginally useful especially if you are a Vim user for a long time. You may learn something, though, if you have not used other vi-like editors.

Some of the tips in the book cover standard Vim commands, so in this respect the book overlaps with Vim's help system. However, the logical organization of the book into functions helps the user find and understand the material faster and easier. The Vim help system is often confusing to navigate, even for intermediate users. Note that this book does cover using and searching the Vim help system.

The book is mainly written for Vim version 7+. For previous versions of vim and gvim, icons are provided to indicate which are able to use the discussed recipe, tip, or map. This is a nice feature for those using older versions of vim.

Personally, I wanted to read this book just to see if it would teach me something I didn't know. The book was successful in this regard. I learned several things from reading this book, and reminded myself of some things I had forgotten, so it was a worthwhile experience. Seeing how someone else uses Vim, as in this book, is also useful even though I may not always use Vim in the same fashion for my own editing tasks.



User review
So underwhelmed
Do not buy this book.

To quote another, what's original is not interesting and what's interesting is not original.

User review
Good amount of information
There is a lot of information in this book. It wastes no time or space describing the many ways to make your Vim experience even more efficient than it already is. Because of its very cut and dry style it reads more like a reference book than anything else, but I think that's perfectly fine for this style of book. It is essentially a slightly more readable, more detailed and better written version of a lot of the Vim help. It's also nice because in many of the chapters, especially the first few (`Better Navigation` and `Production Boosters`) you can pick up a lot of interesting tips. I even learned a few handy commands I had no idea about.

There are a few things wrong with it though. Some things are too close to the Vim built-in help and you're probably better off just looking there. Also, the index isn't very useful and it'd be nice to have a searchable version of the book as well. Like I said, there is a lot of information in this book. It's not for everyone, but I think most Vim users will find plenty of useful stuff in its pages.