Vim's relativenumber option is great, but sometimes it gets into your way a bit. With some clever settings, let's set it up so it just works.

by Geoff Greer

I know Vim better than most. Vim was my first real text editor. I used it for years. I helped write the Floobits plugin for Vim. I’ve delved into Vim’s source code to figure out its workings. I even helped write a patch (though it was rejected). Considering these credentials, I hope you’ll accept that I know what I’m talking about.

It may come as a shock when I say: The only good part of Vim is its user interface.

neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor vim source code in order to achieve the following goals:

• Simplify maintenance to improve the speed that bug fixes and features get merged.
• Split the work between multiple developers.
• Enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source.
• Improve the extensibility power with a new plugin architecture based on coprocesses. Plugins will be written in any programming language without needing explicit support from the editor.

By achieving these goals, new developers will be more inclined to join the community, consequently improving the editor for all users.

If my latest post on the topic did not tip you off, I am a Vim fan. So before some of you start stoning me, let me present you a list of "obscure Vim commands." What I mean by that is: a collection of commands that you might have not encountered before, but that might be useful to you. As a second disclaimer, I do not know which commands you might know and which one you find useful. So this list really is a collection of relatively less known Vim commands, but which can still probably be useful.

Yes, even if you can't believe it, there are a lot fans of the 30-years-old vi editor (or its more recent, just-15-years-old, best clone & great improvement, vim).

Bram Moolenaar - November 2000

If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.

The open source text editor Vim (Vi IMproved) will be used here to present the ideas about effective editing, but they apply to other editors just as well. Choosing the right editor is actually the first step towards effective editing. The discussion about which editor is the best for you would take too much room and is avoided. If you don't know which editor to use or are dissatisfied with what you are currently using, give Vim a try; you won't be disappointed.