Book Image

Mastering Vim

By : Ruslan Osipov
Book Image

Mastering Vim

By: Ruslan Osipov

Overview of this book

Vim is a ubiquitous text editor that can be used for all programming languages. It has an extensive plugin system and integrates with many tools. Vim offers an extensible and customizable development environment for programmers, making it one of the most popular text editors in the world. Mastering Vim begins with explaining how the Vim editor will help you build applications efficiently. With the fundamentals of Vim, you will be taken through the Vim philosophy. As you make your way through the chapters, you will learn about advanced movement, text operations, and how Vim can be used as a Python (or any other language for that matter) IDE. The book will then cover essential tasks, such as refactoring, debugging, building, testing, and working with a version control system, as well as plugin configuration and management. In the concluding chapters, you will be introduced to additional mindset guidelines, learn to personalize your Vim experience, and go above and beyond with Vimscript. By the end of this book, you will be sufficiently confident to make Vim (or its fork, Neovim) your first choice when writing applications in Python and other programming languages.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Search or replace with regular expressions

Regular expressions (or regexes) are wonderful, and you should know how to use them. Vim, as is custom among regex implementations, has its own flavor of regex. However, once you learn one, you're comfortable with all of them.

First, let's talk about the regular (that is, the normal) search and replace command.

Search and replace

Vim supports search and replace through the :substitute command, most often abbreviated to :s. By default, :s will replace one substring with another in a current line. It has the following format:

:s/<find-this>/<replace-with-this>/<flags>

The flags are optional, and you shouldn't worry about them for now. To try it, open...