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0 @date: 2021-08-25

1 @title: Vim Showcase #2 - Text Motion

2 @language: en

3 @categories: linux, vim

4

5 # Vim Showcase #2 - Text Motion

6

7 Welcome to the second installment of the **"Vim Showcase"** series.

8

9 Today, I've prepared some interesting vim default capabilities as well as plugins to

10 enhance those capabilities to he maximum for even better experience. We will

11 take a look at sorting, interacting with system clipboard and finally

12 interacting with vim registers.

13

14 ## Vim sort motion

15

16 Vim allows its user to leverage the power of the shell utilities by typing

17 `:!util-name`. This allows for a numerous possibilities for text editing as

18 you can write special shell scripts to be used when needed.

19

20 Sorting in a file is extremely useful when you need to order some collection

21 of data after it has been gathered by some some script or simply to sorting a

22 header file includes or function declarations for better readability.

23

24 A easy way to sort some lines of text is to enter line-visual mode

25 with `Shift+v`, select the lines you want to sort, then typing `:!sort`.

26

27 This plugin builds on top of this setup, by providing a sort motion for easy

28 access, without a need for visual mode, and more. It can be installed with:

29

30 Plugin 'christoomey/vim-sort-motion'

31

32 The primary interface to this plugin is via the `gs` mapping, which stands for `go sort`, for sorting based

33 on a text object or motion. For example to sort 10 lines down, type: `gs10j`.

34

35 Where this plugin surpasses the shell variant is that it also provides a

36 capability of sorting comma separated lists of items. For example by typing

37 `gsi(` you can sort `(b, c, a)` to become `(a, b, c)`.

38

39 One other neat feature of this plugin is that, because it uses sort shell

40 function under the hood, it's possible to pass user specified flags for

41 different sort behavior. For example by adding the following line to `vimrc` sort will

42 become case insensitive and it will also remove duplicates:

43

44 let g:sort_motion_flags = 'ui'

45

46 **Note**: This feature only works for linewise sorting

47

48 By passing an `n` flag it's possible to sort numbers by their value regardless of the length.

49

50 ## System copy

51

52 Another great plugin by christoomey which defines `cp` to be copy motion and

53 `cv` as paste motion, allows you to easily copy and paste to and from system

54 clipboard without much hassle. Install it by adding:

55

56 Plugin 'christoomey/vim-system-copy'

57

58 You will also need to have `xsel` installed from your terminal, as the plugin

59 needs a way to interact with the system clipboard, with `apt-get install xsel`

60 if you use Debian based distro, or `pacman -S xsel` if you use Arch based

61 distro. It's possible to change the program used, in case you prefer the other

62 one, with:

63

64 let g:system_copy#copy_command='xclip -sel clipboard'

65 let g:system_copy#paste_command='xclip -sel clipboard -o'

66

67 Also make sure to add the following line in order to get rid of the message

68 every time you use the plugin:

69

70 let g:system_copy_silent = 1

71

72 Some examples:

73

74 - `cpiw` => copy word into system clipboard

75 - `cpi'` => copy inside single quotes to system clipboard

76 - `cvi'` => paste inside single quotes from system clipboard

77 - `cP` => is mapped to copy the current line directly

78 - `cV` => is mapped to paste the content of system clipboard to the next line

79

80

81 ## Replace with Register

82

83 In the last section you saw how to interact with system clipboard. Now I am

84 going to talk about vim's built in registers.

85

86 Out of the box, vim provides place to store yanked text called register. To yank

87 the text use `y`, and to later put it use `p`. Vim provides multiple registers

88 whose content can be inspected with `:register`. To specify the register to be

89 used, prefix any yank or put command with `"name`, where name is a character

90 representing a specific register.

91

92 This plugin provides a motion to replace content of a text object with selected

93 register. The default biding is `gr`, which stands for `go replace`.

94

95 Some examples:

96

97 - `"2gri(` => replace the contents of the brackets with the content of register 2

98 - `griw` => replace the current word with the content of default register

99

100 This can also work with visual selections.

101

102 ## Conclusion

103

104 Today, we had a look at some simple but powerful plugins. Because these plugins

105 are just new text motions they can be utilized with any text object showcased in the

106 previous article, so their use is truly limitless.