For my first blog post, I think it is only appropriate that I am to blog about vim, the greatest text editor ever created and the reason that I am in this program today. I first started learning vim in about 2017 when I saw a guy on YouTube editing $\\LaTeX$ very fast. He was showing off his set up and I knew that I had to have that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It has been five years and I can say that I am a professional vim user, but I still learn new things all the time, even some features that are quite basic. Over the course of the last five years, I have developed muscle memory for accomplishing routine text editing tasks. It was not until watching another vim user that I realized that there are other, possibly more efficient ways, to accomplish the same task in vim. While watching The Primeagen on YouTube in this video https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uL9oOZStezw, I caught on to two different ways in that he does the same task as I do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will share with you here the first task as it is easy to explain in text. Given a few lines of code like the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
| Header 1 | Header 2\n| --- | ---\n| thing 1 | thing 2\n| thing 3 | thing 3\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\none may want to add a | character after each line to complete the markdown table. Normally, I would perform this series of steps<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Move the cursor to the end of the first line (where the “2” is)<\/li>
- Hit “ctrl-v” to go into visual block mode<\/li>
- Navigate the cursor to the “3” on the last line by using a series of movements<\/li>
- Then use the command
'<,'>norm A |<\/code> to append a | character to the end of each line<\/li>- Use a vim plugin to align all text at the | character so my code looks good<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
I have found that The Primeagen does something different which uses less key strokes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Hit
vip<\/code> to visual select the paragraph.<\/li>- Use the command
'<,'>s\/$\/ |\/<\/code> to substitute the end of each line in the visually selected area with a space and a | character.<\/li>- Use a vim plugin to align all text at the | character<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Now that I have broken down the steps, I realize that in my first approach I could have also avoided visual block mode and used
vip<\/code> and thenorm<\/code> command works just the same. Now, spending the time to improve this tiny text editing habit that I have to perform at least once a day, I will shave off many seconds in my life!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For my first blog post, I think it is only appropriate that I am to blog about vim, the greatest text editor ever created and the reason that I am in this program today. I first started learning vim in about 2017 when I saw a guy on YouTube editing $\\LaTeX$ very fast. He was … <\/p>\n