Tag: vim

Vim’s ability to display man pages easily using the K mapping often comes in handy. It has been bothering me for a while that the same thing doesn’t work properly in gVim, which I use more. The reason is that Vim’s ability to display man pages depends on having a terminal emulator, which just isn’t true for gVim, hence the garbled display of man pages one sees if one tries viewing a man page in gVim.

Today, I found a way around this limitation. It turns out Vim comes with support for displaying man pages in a split window, and it does it perfectly – colors, links, and all the necessary stuff. The first line enables this feature, which includes by default the K mapping to open the man page in a new split. The second part, which I find very convenient, makes the regular K do the same in gVim. And unlike the original mapping, it also accepts a count before it, so pressing 3K will search section 3 of the man pages for the keyword under the cursor.

" Properly display man pages
" ==========================
runtime ftplugin/man.vim
if has("gui_running")
	nnoremap K :<C-U>exe "Man" v:count "<C-R><C-W>"<CR>
endif

Usually, trailing whitespace is undesirable. Using vim’s :match command, you can easily highlight trailing whitespace:

:match Error /s+$/

This can be combined with autocmd and inserted into ~/.vimrc to highlight trailing whitespace only for certain files:

autocmd FileType python match Error /s+$/

Changing from insert mode to normal mode is usually quick. The other direction is more cumbersome. You either have to reach for the Escape key or use Ctrl-[ (which I never got used to).

After seeing a blog post suggesting mapping jk to exit insert mode, I was inspired to create my own mapping. I chose kj because it’s faster to type, as typing inward is faster than outward (you can check for yourself by tapping your fingers on your desk). To use it, add the following to your .vimrc:

:inoremap kj <ESC>

Now, whenever you are in insert mode, quickly typing kj will exit insert mode. It will introduce a short pause after typing k, but this is only a visual one, so it doesn’t actually slow you down. kj is one of the rarest bigrams in English, so you’ll almost never have to actually type it inside a text, but if you do, just wait a bit after typing k before typing the j.

After writing this post, I came across a Vim Wiki page listing all kinds of ways to avoid the Escape key.

I’ve recently published my vimrc; take a look – it might give you ideas for other neat tricks.