I installed and played with vim 7 on Saturday for about 6 hours, and it looks really, really good. vim is already my favorite text editor, and the changes in vim 7 make it even better. If you want to read a good article that covers that main features of the new vim, check out "First look at Vim 7". It's of reasonable length, and you'll learn a lot. Read it! (Check out all of our posts on vim.) ...

This one is for the visual learners out there. I love vim, and have been using it for years, but I'm still learning new things about it all the time. For noobs to vim, the commands and so on can be a bit ... overwhelming, shall we say. Here's a neat way to learn vim: the "Graphical vi/vim Cheat Sheet and Tutorial". These are a fantastic way to learn vim, or refresh your knowledge. Once you see them, you'll understand what I mean. These are pretty darn neat! (Check out all of our posts on vim.) ...

Mmmm - mmmmh! Two great things that taste better together: vim & Firefox! Here's a page titled How to use Vim with Firefox that walks you through installing, configuring, & using the ViewSourceWith extension. Once that puppy's in place, you can either view a web page's html source using vim (or gvim) or - and this is SO FREAKING COOL! - you can right-click in any textarea, choose View Source With, and then you're editing that textarea in an external instance of vim. Save it, close it, and that stuff goes into that textarea. Too cool! (Check out all of our posts on Firefox & vim.) ...

Hey, here's another oldie but goodie: the Vi Reference Card. Use Vi (or Vim), but need a little reminder as to how you join lines? Or search backwards? Or set autoindent? Then go get the Vi Reference Card, available in several formats: LaTeX, TeX DVI, PDF, or PS. It's so easy to print it out & keep it handy! PS: To join lines: J. To search backwards: ?string. To set autoindent: :set ai. ...

OK, earlier today I pointed users to a Pico tutorial. To make up for that, I'm now going to reveal a good series of vim tutorials from Linux Gazette: part 1, part 2, & part 3. Read 'em, use what they say, & you can become a real vim-usin' man or woman, able to stare down hundreds of text files with a laugh and a sneer. Hey, if anyone's interested, I could post my .vimrc file. Anyone want to see it? In fact, we could all post our .vimrc files & learn from 'em. How about it? (Check out all of my posts on vim.) ...

Looking for quick tips folks have compiled on our fave OS? Do a Google search for linux cheat sheet. How about vim, my fave text editor? Google vim cheat sheet. And so on. You'll find some great stuff, eminently bookmarkable or printable. Try it! (Check out all of my posts on Linux, vim, & Google.) ...

Long-time readers will know that I'm a vim man myself, but when I first started using Unix all those years ago, I used Pico, a simple simple simple text editor. Yes, Pico is designed to be easy to use, but there are still some tricks 'n tips you can learn, as a quick look at "Using the PICO Editor in Linux" will show you. Show it to your *nix noob friend. (Check out all of my posts on vim.) ...

OK, you asked for it, so here it is: my .vimrc file (edited a bit, so do NOT just copy & paste this whole thing into your .vimrc file!), available for your copying & edification. Everyone else, post a pointer to yours in the comments (do NOT just cut & paste your .vimrc file in, as the blog software will strip stuff out)! set tabstop=2 set expandtab set shiftwidth=2 set guifont=Andale\ Mono/9/-1/5/48/0/0/0/1/0 " Set fileformat to Unix set ff=unix " Set encoding to UTF set enc=utf-8 " autosave if i switch to another buffer set autowrite " syntax highlighting on set syntax=on " line numbers on set nu " enable use of the mouse in terminals as well as gui set mouse=a " Set wrapping set textwidth=> set nolinebreak " Set no auto indenting set noautoindent " Searching " Use emacs-like incremental search (find as you type) set incsearch " Make searches case-insensitive, unless they contain upper-case letters set ...

First of all, don't use KVim, the KDE version of the wonderful vim text editor. The developers have essentially abandoned the project for something they now call "yzis", and frankly, I still don't perceive that there's any there there. We'll see. I finally gave up on KVim and switched to the GNOME versions of vim, which has been fine. If you are gonna use KVim, you're very quickly going to discover an incredibly annoying bug that manifests itself in one of 2 ways: 1. You open the program, and the windows starts shrinking until it's tiny. OR 2. The program opens fine, but every time you save, the window shrinks about 50 or so pixels on the right & bottom; after 5 or so saves, I would have to manually maximize the window again, which is both annoying & ridiculous. Here's a ridiculously hacky solution, but it works. It's not elegant or clever … but it works. Plus, it's a nice example of how to use the sometimes arcane KDE Configure Windows Behavior ...

The latest versions of K/Ubuntu came with very, very late betas of OpenOffice.org 2, but since then OOo came out of beta, but K/Ubuntu hasn't been updated. Fortunately, in open source fashion, one Ubuntu user has compiled OOo2 & made it available for users to download. I'm using it, & things work just fine. To upgrade your OOo2, you need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file, AKA your repository list if you use Synaptic. I use the command line, so I first ran this: sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list Then I added this line: deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./ I saved & closed the file, & then ran the following commands: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade APT wanted to update OOo2, so I told it to go ahead. A bit later, I had the latest & greatest OOo2 running on my Kubuntu machine. Beautiful. (For more on this stuff, see this post on the Ubuntu Forums.) (Check out all of our posts on OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, ...