as I’m going through the process of learning vim, I’m discovering newfound powers. one of them being to execute commands from vim itself.
below examples might better explain some of them:
-
want to see what files are in current directory? enter command mode(by typing
:) and follow it by a bang(!). then dolslike you’d do in a terminal and press enter. this is not limited to just ls. you can enter any command that you can enter in terminal. for example::! uname --operating-system(which will output GNU/Linux :)) -
so you want to quickly save just a certain part of your file into another file? just select everything you need by entering visual mode(
v) and do:w filename(actual command you’ll see would be'<,'>:w filename). verify it using 1.(i.e.,:! cat filename. -
want to quickly paste another file into current one? do
:r filename. it’ll paste its contents below your cursor. -
or maybe you want to paste results of a command? do
:r !ls *.png.
vim is my ~ sweet ~ now. make it yours too.
But what do you do if you are not using a us keyboard?
The layout is what matters for vim and it’s derivatives. I might be wrong here, but if you really need to be able to use the same keybindings as you would on a English qwerty one, you could try remapping things to their addresses or whatever that’s called - basically the same key, physically, regardless of its layout mapping.
That being said, it’s vim, you can remap the command to get back to normal mode from terminal mode to whatever key or key sequence you like most.
Using mouse to scroll up and down your terminal window inside vim also gets you back to normal mode.
And, well, quitting the shell of your terminal in vim works just fine - either via
commandor hittingCtrl+d.On my keyboard the layout is mostly the same, it’s not like AZERTY or something like that. The problem is some keys like
\are behind modifiers (In this case AltGr+\), so most times when I’ve tried the Ctrl+\ combination it hasn’t worked (You can see how the keyboard layout is here