Vim Mastery

Hello, Vim

Are you intrigued by all those fancy Vim tricks? Are you considering a switch, but are overwhelmed by the steep learning curve? If so, why don’t you come along with me, and I’ll show you everything I know about this incredible editor.

Finding Your Way Around

Let’s begin by reviewing the absolute basics. With Vim, how do we save a file, or quit the editor, or edit a new file? How do we set configuration values?

Mappings and Commands

Let’s get back into it. In this lesson, we’ll review addition configuration, custom mappings, and auto commands. Don’t forget: you won’t learn this properly, unless you work along!

A Prettier Vim

Before we dig into the intricacies of Vim, let’s take a moment to focus on visuals. Can we at least set up a better color scheme and font? Sure, we can. And what about those ugly scrollbars in MacVim?

Optimizing Window Splits

A neat feature of Vim is its ability to create any arrangement of split windows. In this episode, you’ll learn how this works, and will then move on to configuring their default keybindings, accordingly.

Vundle and Better File Browsing

You’ll frequently need to browse your project’s file structure, so it’s important that we build a good workflow. In this lesson, we’ll first learn how to improve Vim’s default netrw file browser with Tim Pope’s excellent Vinegar.vim. Next, for a more traditional experience, we’ll pull in NERDTree. As you’ll find, when we use Vundle for dependency management, downloading and installing any plugin is a cinch!

Faster Browsing with CtrlP

We’ll next pull in the popular CtrlP plugin, which allows you to rapidly switch from file to file.

Configuration Tweaks

Before we move ahead to working with c-tags, let’s first make a handful of configuration tweaks. First, we’ll fix a conflict between NERDTree and netrw. Next, we’ll enable fancy symbols for our Fira Code font. And finally, we’ll finish up by improving MacVim’s awkward tabs, and switching our Ctrl P keyboard shortcut over to the more familiar Command P.

Browse Like a Pro With Ctags

Imagine that you need to find a particular method in your project. The traditional way is to hunt around the project tree in your sidebar, find the file, click on it, and scroll the page until you find the method. Ehh, we can do way better than that. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to instantly browse to any symbol in your project. It’s lightning fast!

Custom Highlighting

We have a theme we like, but what if we need to tweak a few visuals? Let me show you the basic process in this lesson.

Site-Wide Search and Replace

An immediate pitfall for new Vim users is how to perform site-wide searches and replacements. In this lesson, I’ll demonstrate my exact approach – using Ag.vim and Greplace.vim.

PeepOpen

Let’s switch back to how we browse files. It’s crucial that you find a workflow you enjoy. Another option you have is a GUI app, called PeepOpen. If you enjoy the Sublime-Text form of “Command p”, you might find that you prefer this option.

Laravel-Specific Mappings

As you write code in Vim, try to keep a mental record of all the tasks that take longer than you’d like. Even an extra two seconds adds up, trust me. In this lesson, I’ll show you a handful of mappings that you might consider, when working in a Laravel app.

Managing Snippets

When you need to create code snippets in Vim, SnipMate will do the job quite nicely. I’ll show you how it works.

Surrounding Text

Tim Pope’s excellent Surround plugin is a stable in every Vim user’s tool belt. Need to quickly change single quotes to double quotes? Or do you want to instantly delete a surrounding HTML tag, or update it to a new one all together? With this plugin, it’s all a cinch.

PHP Optimizations

In this episode, we’ll focus on three different PHP optimizations. We’ll begin by updating our syntax file. Next, we’ll add support for automatically adding use imports to any class. Finally, we’ll add a mapping that allows us to instantly sort use statements by length.

Auto-Completions

We’ve yet to figure out how to handle auto-completion. As such, in this episode, we’ll take a first step. The goal is to type a sequence of characters, hit “tab”, and then see all relevant results from nearby buffers. As always though, throughout the video, we’ll discuss a number of other helpful Vim tricks.

Automatic PSR-2 Formatting

Let’s set up php-cs-fixer, so that we may type a simple keystroke and instantly format any PHP class, according to the PSR-2 convention.

Marks

Vim marks offer you a way to instantly return to any location in your project, simply by typing a keystroke. I think you’ll like it!

Tabs, Indents, and Spaces

Unfortunately, when it comes to managing tabs, indents, and spacing, well – Vim can get pretty confusing. That’s okay

learn how to configure them once, and then feel free to expel all this junk from your brain.

Fun With Macros

A macro is nothing more than a recording that can be played back at any time. An excellent candidate for a macro is any piece of workflow that you find yourself repeating over and over. As an example, in this video, we’ll record a macro to take a constructor argument, and then automatically initialize and assign it, as a property.

PHP Documentor and Ultisnips

Are you manually writing out your doc-blocks in Vim? Annoying, right? Luckily, there’s a much simpler way. In this episode, we’ll pull in the PHP Documentor plugin, while also fetching UltiSnips, which is similar (even a replacement) to SnipMate.