December 3, 2022

About Vim and the Global Command

Vim and the Global Command: basic structure

This post is not a complete review of Vim’s Global Command but is just a series of personal observations on it.

You can find a good review, written by those who know much more about it than I do, on this page.

With the “Global Command” of Vim (g) you can replicate various ex-commands on multiple lines.

The basic structure of the Global Command is very simple: :g/pattern/command, meaning:

November 26, 2022

Vim, VimTex: environments and commands in LaTeX

A smart system for writing

Vim is a great editing tool.

LaTeX is a “State of the Art” typesetting system.

Vim and LaTeX together make a powerful writing system, but an add-on is needed to relate them.

VimTex provides exactly that target by relating Vim to LaTeX, and it does its job very well.

So Vim and VimTex is a smart system for every kind of writer in LaTeX.

The topic is vast and certainly cannot be contained in a short post like this one.

November 17, 2022

Vim Is Magic or Nomagic?

What’s this joke?

The title is a joke with the name of “V.I.M.” but, at the same time, it’s a real mode of Vim itself: the Magic Mode.

To understand what Magic Mode is, the primary source is the item :help magic in Vim.

In a few words:

The Magic Mode refers to the regular expressions
The Magic Mode is enabled by default in Vim.
You can explicitly invoke the Magic Mode with the \m command in the RegEx search area.
To deactivate it you must set \M (capitalized m) in the RegEx search area.
When you use the \M command you invoke the Nomagic Mode.
Nomagic Mode turns “almost all special regex symbols into ordinary ones unless they start with a backslash”.
There is also a Very Nomagic Mode that extends the effect to other characters, not relevant to this article.

When is magic mode (default) better than nomagic?

To analyze the difference between magic and nomagic mode, I resume a formula from a previous article of mine.

October 24, 2022

Markdown in Firefox

Abstract

Use Mozilla Firefox as a Markdown documents viewer written on Linux Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch, with mention of MS Windows and macOS.

Mozilla Firefox and the Markdown layout

Mozilla Firefox, one of the best Internet browsers, does not natively read documents written in Markdown.

If you try to open a document written in Markdown, the browser asks whether it should save it locally or open it with an application among those offered by the operating system. But it doesn’t render the document.

October 20, 2022

Vim, UltiSnips and Honza vim-snippets: difference and management of the snippets and UltiSnips folders

What is the subject of this article?

In this article I will talk about Vim, snippets powered by SirVer UltiSnip: “the ultimate solution for snippets in Vim” and Honza vim-snippets (hereafter also simply referred as “honza”).

For some more information you can refer to this previous article of mine.

SirVer UltiSnip is a plugin to launch and manage snippets in Vim.

The application does not contain snippets but you can create your own by following the plugin syntax or use a collection of ready-made snippets.

September 24, 2022

Vim: study on transposing lists of names from horizontal to vertical

Primary purpose of the study.

Initial status: series of inline names, separated by a semicolon followed by a space.
Objective: Transpose all names into one column by removing both semicolons and spaces.
Purpose: Creating list for mail-merging with e-mail client (Thunderbird).
Tools: Vim and built-in RegEx function.
Example:

Secondary goal

To test the integration between Markdown and css tags.