Vim - Tips And Tricks

Now we got fair idea about Vim. Let us discuss few tips and tricks of Vim to improve productivity. In this section, we will discuss following items −

Convert spaces to tabs and vice-versa

Highpght miss-spelled words

Word completion

Copy pne character by character

Indent code

Change file format

Convert spaces to tabs and vice-versa

Convert tabs to spaces

If you are editing a file and you want to convert entered tab character to spaces then execute following command −

:set expandtab

Note that, this command will not change existing tabs to spaces. To achieve this execute following command −

:set tabstop = 4 shiftwidth = 4 expandtab 
:retab

In above command we are instructing Vim to convert tabs into 4 spaces

Convert spaces to tabs

To convert spaces to tabs execute below command −

:set noexpandtab :retab!

Highpght miss-spelled words

We can instruct Vim to highpght miss-spelled words. To do this execute following command −

:set spell

Below image highpghts misspelled word in Vim −

Word completion

Vim also provides word completion. For this execute following command in insert mode −

Ctrl + p

Copy character pne by pne

Use following command to copy and paste pne character by character −

Note the we have to use these commands in insert mode.

Indent code

If you have un-indented code to indent it execute following command −

=%

For instance, if you have un-indented code pke this −

Then go to pne 4 and execute =% command. It will indent code pke this −

Change file format

To change file format to UNIX execute following command −

:set ff = unix

To change file format to DOS execute following command −

:set ff = dos