Registers in Vim let you run actions or commands on text stored within them. To access a register, you type “a before a command, where a is the name of a register. If you want to copy the current line into register k, you can type “kyy Or you can append to a register by … Read more
Your problem with Vim is that you don’t grok vi. You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut whole lines. In fact programmers, editing source code, very often want to work on whole lines, ranges of lines and blocks of code. However, yy is only one of many way … Read more
Why not use tabs (introduced in Vim 7)? You can switch between tabs with :tabn and :tabp, With :tabe <filepath> you can add a new tab; and with a regular :q or :wq you close a tab. If you map :tabn and :tabp to your F7/F8 keys you can easily switch between files. If there … Read more
The <Leader> key is mapped to \ by default. So if you have a map of <Leader>t, you can execute it by default with \+t. For more detail or re-assigning it using the mapleader variable, see :help leader To define a mapping which uses the “mapleader” variable, the special string “<Leader>” can be used. It … Read more
It depends on what you mean. Do you want actual tab characters in your file to appear 4 spaces wide, or by “tab” do you actually mean an indent, generated by pressing the tab key, which would result in the file literally containing (up to) 4 space characters for each “tab” you type? Depending on … Read more
remap is an option that makes mappings work recursively. By default it is on and I’d recommend you leave it that way. The rest are mapping commands, described below: :map and :noremap are recursive and non-recursive versions of the various mapping commands. For example, if we run: :map j gg (moves cursor to first line) … Read more
Just the $ (dollar sign) key. You can use A to move to the end of the line and switch to editing mode (Append). To jump the last non-blank character, you can press g then _ keys. The opposite of A is I (Insert mode at beginning of line), as an aside. Pressing just the … Read more
As has been pointed out in a couple of other answers, the preferred method now is NOT to use smartindent, but instead use the following (in your .vimrc): filetype plugin indent on ” show existing tab with 4 spaces width set tabstop=4 ” when indenting with ‘>’, use 4 spaces width set shiftwidth=4 ” On … Read more
Update: Better answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38258720/62202 To turn off autoindent when you paste code, there’s a special “paste” mode. Type :set paste Then paste your code. Note that the text in the tooltip now says — INSERT (paste) –. After you pasted your code, turn off the paste-mode, so that auto-indenting when you type works correctly … Read more
For those tasks I use most of the time block selection. Put your cursor on the first # character, press CtrlV (or CtrlQ for gVim), and go down until the last commented line and press x, that will delete all the # characters vertically. For commenting a block of text is almost the same: First, … Read more