A Couple More Vim Tips

Vim enlightenment is a never ending process.

Following on from my 2017 Vim Tips & Tricks article, this post will list a couple more tips that I have added to my tool belt since that post.

As per usual, many tips n’ tricks are baked into my vimrc.

Persistent Undo

Vim has had persistent undo capability since version 7.3. Due to apathy I only recently became annoyed enough about lost undos that I enabled it, now I can’t imagine living without it.

By default, Vim does not enable persistent undo meaning change history will only be saved for the active buffer, changing to another file results in change history starting from scratch even when navigating back to the original file. This is how one loses undos.

Persistent undo remedies this issue by saving change history to disk. Navigating between files or even exiting and returning to Vim will reference these saved change histories allowing undo and redo to naturally work as one would expect.

I favour saving these changes to fast temporary storage which means change history will only be saved for the uptime of the workstation, which in my case is all I need.

Add this snippet to your vimrc:

let s:undoDir = "/tmp/.undodir_" . $USER if ! isdirectory ( s:undoDir ) call mkdir ( s:undoDir , "" , 0700 ) endif let & undodir = s:undoDir set undofile

The above configuration will store Vim change histories in a private subdirectory of /tmp , which on modern Linux workstations is carved from RAM. If one desires to persist undos across reboots then please replace /tmp with a directory in your home directory such as $HOME/.vim/undodir for example. Note, in the latter case you may need to periodically clean the undo directory since it will accumulate changes forever.

Point in time undoing and redoing

The undo ( u ) and redo ( ctrl-r ) commands allow for rollback and roll forward through edit history. Vim actually stores these changes in a tree structure, changes can fork off branches, some of which may be unaccessible using the standard undo and redo commands which traverse only along a single linear path.

Plugins such as Gundo and undotree provide undo visualisation and navigation of the complete change tree.

However, a simpler approach than navigating around the change tree is to simply undo to a point in time using the earlier and later commands.

Say you wanted to undo to 10 minutes ago then enter:

:earlier 10m

Or to redo forward 50 seconds:

:later 50s

I strongly recommend enabling persistent undo to extract maximum benefit for the earlier and later commands.

Incrementing and decrementing

Vim provides the very useful ctrl-a and ctrl-x commands to increment and decrement numbers.

In normal mode, entering ctrl-a will increment the first number to the right of the cursor on the current line. Preceded by a count ctrl-a will increment by the count amount. The ctrl-x command will do the reverse operation of decrementing.

Personally, I don’t like increment and decrement to take octal and hex numbers into account, I prefer an increment on 07 to result in 08 and not 010 .

Blanking the nrformats option will force decimal-based arithmetic:

set nrformats =

Mapping the + and - keys to increment and decrement feels more natural than using the ctrl based defaults:

nnoremap + < C - a > nnoremap - < C - x >

Simply hit + or - to adjust numbers on the current line.

A very useful Vim increment capability is the g ctrl-a command which can increment a sequence of numbers in a vertical visual selection.

Say for example you have the following three lines in a visual selection (aka using ctrl-v block selection):

0 0 0

Entering g ctrl-a will result in:

1 2 3

Prepending a count to the g ctrl-a command will determine the step size of the increments. The g ctrl-x command will decrement instead of increment.

Again, I like to use + and - instead of ctrl-a and ctrl-x , hence I use these mappings instead for visual sequence increment and decrement:

xnoremap + g < C - a > xnoremap - g < C - x >

Whether you use the mappings listed above or the defaults of ctrl-a and ctrl-x incrementing and decrementing numbers in Vim is very easy.

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