Copy and Paste

• copy/delete word under cursor in Vim yw / byw

• Assuming that the cursor is at the first character of the word simply do this in command mode: yw y is for yank and w is for word.

Other ways of doing the same thing which are not as efficient: vey the v starts visual select mode. e tells vim to move to end of word. y yanks or copies the word. to delete replace y with x.

if the cursor is somewhere in the middle of the word, add a b before the command as in: byw or bvey

• I want to know if there is any way by which I can paste yanked text to the command window. For eg. if I have yanked a word and I want to grep it in some location I cant simply paste the word using ‘p’. However if I copy it to clipboard, Shift-Insert will paste the same thing. Is there any tweak available which would allow me to paste yanked text to the vim command prompt? I am using gvim on Windows.

<ctrl+r>"

where “ stands for default register.

Split Layouts

:sp <filename> split the layout vertically :vs <filename> horizontal split

Pro Tip: Make sure to utilize tab completion to find files after typing :sp. Pro Tip: You can also specify different areas of the screen where the splits should occur by adding the following lines to the .vimrc file: set splitbelow set splitright Pro Tip: Want to move between the splits without using the mouse? Simply add the following to .vimrc and you can jump between splits with just one key combination:

split navigations nnoremap <C-J> <C-W><C-J> nnoremap <C-K> <C-W><C-K> nnoremap <C-L> <C-W><C-L> nnoremap <C-H> <C-W><C-H>

Buffers

While VIM can do tabs, many prefer buffers and splits. You can think of a buffer as a recently opened file. VIM provides easy access to recent buffers, just type :b to switch to an open buffer (autocomplete works here as well). You can also use :ls to list all buffers.

Pro Tip: At the end of the :ls output, VIM will prompt with Hit enter to continue. You can instead type :b and pick the buffer immediately while you still have the list displayed (which saves a keystroke and having to remember the buffer number).

PEP8

To add the proper PEP8 indentation, add the following to your .vimrc:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.py
    \ set tabstop=4
    \ set softtabstop=4
    \ set shiftwidth=4
    \ set textwidth=79
    \ set expandtab
    \ set autoindent
    \ set fileformat=unix

and

Plugin 'vim-scripts/indentpython.vim'

Flagging Unnecessary Whitespace We also want to avoid extraneous whitespace. We can have VIM flag that for us so that it’s easy to spot – and then remove.

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.py,*.pyw,*.c,*.h match BadWhitespace /\s\+$/

Other file:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.js, *.html, *.css
    \ set tabstop=2
    \ set softtabstop=2
    \ set shiftwidth=2

Syntax Checking/Highlighting

  Plugin 'scrooloose/syntastic'
  Plugin 'nvie/vim-flake8'

  let python_highlight_all=1
  syntax on

Saving a read-only file edited in vi / vim

:w !sudo tee %

Cheat Sheet:

Cheat Sheet Image