TechniTip.Net

Make VIM Nice Looking

Linux users usually know the text editor called “vi”. For beginners it’s tough to use and the look and feel is not very nice. “vim” which means vi-improved brings many improvements. To make vim more nice looking I’ve put my settings for your .vimrc together. I personally like the following settings:

• Syntax highlighting
• Different color scheme
• Disable indenting when copy and pasting a text from clip board
• Replace tabs with blanks
• Use 2 spaces as tabs instead of 4 spaces
• Improve the search
• Display cursor position

Open the .vimrc in your home directory and add the following settings:

" enable syntax highlightning
syntax enable

" set a different color scheme
colorscheme desert

" avoid identing when pasting a text
set paste

" enable auto indent
set autoindent

" expand tabs to spaces
set expandtab

" set the tab stop to 2 spaces and soft tab stop to 2 spaces
set tabstop=2 sts=2
set shiftwidth=2

" immediately search and display the typed search pattern
set incsearch

" highlighting of search matches
set hlsearch

" show cursor position
set ruler

Much better now! Try the search (e.g. ESC /high) and you will recognize that the search pattern will be immediately highlighted when you enter it.

Note: If you want to replace all tabs within an existing file you can now use the vi command “:retab” and all tabs will be removed according the settings done in your .vimrc.

And finally the result:

Search and Replace over Multiple Files

Sometimes you need to search and replace strings over multiple files. This can easily be done using perl. I found this tip from www.liamdelahunty.com/tips

perl -pi -w -e 's/search/replace/g;' *.php

-e means execute the following line of code.
-i means edit in-place
-w write warnings
-p loop