Re: Textpad to GVIM

On Mar 5, 10:18 am, Govind <i.am.an...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been a longtime user of Textpad on windows and transitioning more to
> Linux.  Gedit by itself doesn't have some features I want like
> a) Columnar mode selection
> b) ability to sort lines
> c) Word Wrap (at least nothing that jumped out)
>
> I was told that GVIM is pretty good in terms of being able to do stuff, so
> I want to get started using it.  What are my next steps (I've installed it,
> of course).
>

Your first step should probably be to run the tutorial to get basic
movement and editing down.

Then you should probably start browsing the help, a little at a time.
You can access Vim's help by typing :help and then pressing the Enter
key. There are a lot of commands in Vim, which is the source of its
power. Think of Vim as a video game, where your entire keyboard is
made up of movements and attacks, which can be chained together for
devastating combos!

Besides browsing the help, you should pay attention to tasks you are
doing which are making you inefficient. Vim probably has a way to make
the task more efficient, even if you need to resort to defining a
mapping or custom command. If you often spend a lot of time
highlighting just the text within an XML tag, for example, :help text-
objects will teach you that three keystrokes will select it for you:
vit. Or even better, if you intend to change that text, cit. Note how
I used :help with a topic to jump right to the relevant section.

More on how to use help or getting started with Vim is available here:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Getting_started
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Learn_to_use_help

For answers to the specific features that interest you:
a) column selection is accomplished by pressing CTRL-V and then
selecting text with normal movement commands
b) sorting lines is accomplished with :%sort (for the entire file) or
something like :10,20sort to sort just lines 10-20
c) word wrap can either mean "hard" wrap by inserting a newline, or
"soft" wrap which does not change the text but displays the line
wrapped. The former is accomplished with a variety of options (:help
'textwidth' and :help 'formatoptions') and a command (:help gq). The
latter with the options 'wrap' and 'linebreak'.

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