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We spend a lot of time every day editing text: e-mail, coding, blogging etc. Wouldn’t it be great if you could increase your efficiency and save time? If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I am a Vim lover. I came across this video of a February 2007 presentation by Bram Moolennar, the creator of Vim. He discusses 7 habits of effective text editing using Vim. He uses Vim as an example but these habits can be applied to any (good) text editor.

Now he isn’t a superb speaker but if you can get past the dry jokes, I think you will find this fairly informative. I certainly learned something from it! If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the actual presentation is only the first 45 minutes; there is a 35 minute Q&A session at the end. A PDF of his slides are available here for those really short of time.

I see software developers using Notepad or a similar editor. I think that’s terrible — you are wasting a lot of time.

- Bram Moolenaar, Creator of Vim

To summarize his presentation, mastering each of the 7 habits requires 3 steps. First is to detect the inefficiency, then to find a quicker way to solve it and finally, make it a habit. These are the 7 habits and a short summary of each:

1. Moving around quickly
   One of the greatest powers of Vim is it’s movement techniques. Regular expression searches and search highlighting to a long way to saving time when editing text.
2. Don’t type it twice
   Type a the first few letters then use insert mode completion to fill in the rest of the word.
3. Fix it when it’s wrong
   Use custom-scripts or create your own macros to correct common spelling mistakes (i.e. “:iabbrev teh the” to automatically change “teh” to “the” when editing)
4. A file seldom comes alone
   Use grep (not the command-line function) to find other files related to your current file.
5. Let’s work together
   Apply Vim-style editing to other applications. For example, Firefox has an extension that implements Vim-navigation and commands into all web text-boxes.
6. Text is structured
   If you are looking through logs or other structured files, you can use a small script to quickly clean up any extraneous information.
7. Sharpen the saw
   You need to keep using commands and tweaking any inefficiencies in order to continue improving your Vim skills.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Efficiency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.