PechaKucha

Jonas Raaschou-Pedersen

2024-08-20

Academic off season

• Retreat 2024
• Time for reflection and learning new skills for next season
• What is worth investing time in? 🤔
• One skill to influence everything:
  • Text editing
• Academia == Glorified text editing

Text editing

• Usual text editing:
  • Movement: mouse & arrow keys
  • Editing: backspace, delete, shift+click, copy, paste
• Cons:
  • Hands don’t stay on home row
  • Inefficient & slow (compared to alternative)
• Exists a more efficient way of editing text:
  • Vim

Vim

• Vim, an old obscure text editor?
• A toolbox to edit text efficiently
  • Available in editors (Vim bindings)
  • E.g. VSCode, JupyterLab, Overleaf
• Rest of presentation think:
  • Vim == toolbox for efficient text editing

Setup for rest of presentation

• Left side: Vim concepts with text
• Right side: short video of the concepts applied
• Bottom: keys pressed in real time
• PechaKucha is only a teaser
  • Ressources for further learning in the end
  • 30 min. vimtutor highly encouraged

Vim: multi-modal text editing

• One mode for each task
• Normal Mode:
  • Quick editing and navigation
• Insert Mode
  • What you are used to (+more)
• Visual Mode
  • For selecting text and editing it fast
• \(+\) More modes left out for brievity

Basic movements in normal mode

• h, j, k, l
  • Move left, down, up, right
• w, b,
  • Move by words (forward/backward)
• 0, $
  • Jump to the beginning/end of a line
• Home row all the time

More movements in normal mode

• Ctrl-d, Ctrl-u
  • Scroll down/up half a page
• gg, G
  • Jump to the beginning/end of the file
• Ctrl-o, Ctrl-i
  • Jump to the previous/next cursor position

Deleting words

• Vim has several operators for editing text
• d - Delete operator (normal mode)
  • dw - delete word
  • d2w - delete two words
  • diw - delete word under cursor

Changing words

• c - Change operator (normal mode)
  • cw - change word (and enter insert mode)
  • c2w - change two words
  • ciw - change word under cursor

Change everything inside delimiters

• Using c, the change operator:
  • ci( - change everything inside parentheses
  • ci[ - change everything inside brackets
  • ci{ - change everything inside curly braces
• Can stand anywhere inside delimiters and change it!

Change everything inside quotes

• Using c, the change operator:
  • ci" - change everything inside double quotes
  • ci' - change everything inside single quotes
• Can stand anywhere on line and change it!

Changing surrounding delimiters/quotes

• Using cs, the change surrounding operator:
  • cs"' - change surrounding double quotes to single quotes
  • cs]) - change surrounding brackets to parentheses
  • cs}) - change surrounding curly braces to parentheses

Deleting surrounding delimiters/quotes

• Using ds, the delete surrounding operator:
  • ds" - delete surrounding double quotes
  • ds) - delete surrounding parentheses
  • ds} - delete surrounding curly braces

Inserting new line above and below

• o - insert new line below the current line
• O - insert new line above the current line
• Correct indentation is kept

Front, back, join

• I - insert at the beginning of the line
• A - insert at the end of the line
• J - join the current line with the next line

Substitutions

• :s/foo/bar/g
  • substitute foo with bar on current line
• :%s/ipsum/lorem/g
  • substitute ipsum with lorem in entire file
• Can use regular expressions (regex)
  • Regex practice suddenly very useful!

Substitutions on selected lines

• Edit selected lines:
  • Select lines in visual mode
  • Write substitution command
• Quickly edit multiple lines at once
• Example:
  • Convert list of names to strings at once
  • & means whatever matched in first part

Marks

• Marks are like bookmarks
• Jump between different parts of file
• ma set a mark with the name a
• mb set a mark with the name b
• 'a jump to the mark a
• 'b jump to the mark b

Takeaways

• Vim
  • An editor
  • A toolbox for efficient text editing
  • Vim bindings available in many editors
• Fixed cost of learning, afterwards:
  • You will be able to edit text (much) faster
  • Text editing in general becomes fun
    • Does not matter what text you edit; it is fun just to edit text
• Have only scratched the tip of the iceberg
  • So much good stuff left out!

Ressources for further learning

• Try the 30 min Vimtutor
  • Download Neovim (or through a package manager), run nvim and type :Tutor inside
    • Use Neovim; the modern version (fork) of Vim
• MIT missing-semester lecture notes
• VsCode Vim tutorials
• Vim bindings in JupyterLab
• Vim bindings overleaf
• Bram Molenaar talks (creator of Vim, RIP)
  • Talk 1 & Talk 2
• Neovim user-manual
• Vim bindings in browser
  • surfingkeys or vimium

Appendix (not in PechaKucha)

• Use the American keyboard layout when coding
  • Delimiters, braces & square brackets, much more comfortable
• Maps Caps Lock -> Escape and Escape -> Caps Lock
  • Caps Lock is rarely used; Escape is used all the time
• Use the 10 finger method