Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim

163 Pages·2018·3.55 MB·English

by  Drew Neil

Early Praise for
Modern Vim
I’m once again impressed by the limitless possibilities of this classic editor. It goes
without saying that I would—and will—recommend Modern Vim to anyone using
Vim, including admins, developers, and Linux enthusiasts.
➤ Tibor Simic
Software Developer, Ingemark
With Practical Vim I am able to move around my text like a kangaroo. Modern Vim
puts a Swiss Army knife into my pouch.
➤ Miroslav Šedivý
Software Architect, UBIMET GmbH
Even as an experienced Vim user and plugin author, I learned a lot with this book.
➤ Kassio Borges
Senior Software Engineer, Zendesk, and author of the Neoterm plugin
If you’re curious as to what’s new in Vim 8 and Neovim, or looking to extend
the collection of great recipes started in Practical Vim, this book is an excellent
resource.
➤ Eric Casteleijn
Vim Enthusiast
We've left this page blank to
make the page numbers the
same in the electronic and
paper books.
We tried just leaving it out,
but then people wrote us to
ask about the missing pages.
Anyway, Eddy the Gerbil
wanted to say “hello.”
Modern Vim
Craft Your Development Environment
with Vim 8 and Neovim
Drew Neil
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Raleigh, North Carolina
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The team that produced this book includes:
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Managing Editor: Brian MacDonald
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Copyright © 2018 The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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without the prior consent of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN-13: 978-1-68050-262-6
Encoded using the finest acid-free high-entropy binary digits.
Book version: P1.0—May 2018
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1. Get Modern Vim . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Tip 1. Installing Vim 8 2
Tip 2. Switching to Neovim 4
Tip 3. Enabling Python Support in Neovim 7
2. Installing Plugins . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Tip 4. Understanding Scripts, Plugins, and Packages 11
Tip 5. Installing Plugins to Your Package 14
Tip 6. Managing Plugins with minpac 18
3. Opening Files . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Tip 7. Finding Files Using Fuzzy Path Matching 23
Tip 8. Finding Files Semantically 30
Tip 9. Jumping to an Alternate File 35
4. Working with the Quickfix List . . . . . . . . 39
Tip 10. Running a Build and Navigating Failures 39
Tip 11. Switching Compilers 46
Tip 12. Linting the Current File 50
Tip 13. Searching Files with Grep-Alikes 56
Tip 14. Running Tests and Browsing Failures 63
5. Neovim’s Built-In Terminal Emulator . . . . . . 69
Tip 15. Grokking Terminal Mode 71
Tip 16. Running Programs in a Terminal Buffer 75
Tip 17. Managing Windows That Contain Terminal
Buffers 79
Contents • vi
Tip 18. Using Normal Mode Commands in a Terminal
Buffer 82
Tip 19. Sending Commands to a Terminal Buffer 85
Tip 20. Applying Customizations to Your Shell in a
Terminal Buffer 87
Tip 21. Avoiding Nested Neovim Instances 88
Tip 22. Using an Existing nvim Instance as the
Preferred Editor 91
6. Sessions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Tip 23. Saving and Restoring Sessions 96
Tip 24. Making Undo Persist Between Sessions 99
Tip 25. Restarting Terminal Processes When Resuming
a Session 101
7. Configuring Vim . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Tip 26. Using Autocommands to Respond to Events 105
Tip 27. Respecting Project Conventions 112
Tip 28. Setting Buffer-Local Configuration Per Project 116
A1. What’s Next for Modern Vim? . . . . . . . . 127
Integrating with the Language Server Protocol 127
What’s Next for Vim 8 129
What’s Next for Neovim 130
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work with the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Thanks to Susannah Pfalzer for encouraging me to submit a proposal for
another book on Vim. And thanks to Katharine Dvorak for all your help
throughout the project.
This book could not have happened without the support of my wife, Hannah.
I’m so grateful to you for believing in me.
Modern Vim also wouldn’t have been possible without my technical reviewers.
Each of you contributed something and helped shape the book. I’d like to
thank Ali Alwasity, Kassio Borges, Eric Casteleijn, Tim Chase, Junegunn Choi,
Javier Collado, Dave Copeland, Marco Hinz, Justin Keyes, Andy Lester, Janko
Marohnic ´, Tim Pope, Steven! Ragnarok, fREW Schmidt, Miroslav Šedivý, Tibor
Simic, Ken Takata, Tim Tyrrell, Andrew Wray, and Alex Young.
Thanks to the folks at thoughtbot, Ben Orenstein in particular, for commis-
sioning a series of video tutorials about Vim and Neovim. This collaboration
pushed me to begin working on the book and gave me a running start.
I’m always grateful to everyone who works on Vim, Neovim, and the assorted
plugins that make my life easer.
The Neovim logo was designed by Jason Long, and is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.1 We’ve used the one-
color flat variation of the logo, because it looks best both online and in print.
The Vim logo is copyrighted. Thanks to Bram Moolenaar for granting permis-
sion to reproduce a one-color flat variation of the Vim logo in this book.
November 2017 was an unusually fruitful month. On November 1, we pub-
lished the first beta edition of this book. On November 2, my wife gave birth
to our son, Conrad. I could hardly believe my luck.
1. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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Introduction
Vim’s core functionality makes it a good programmer’s text editor. Turning
Vim into a full-blown development environment means combining it with
other tools and extending its capabilities with plugins. In Practical Vim [Nei15],
I focused on the core features of the editor. In this book, I show you how to
extend Vim and make it the centerpiece of a Unix-based IDE.
How This Book Is Structured
Modern Vim is a recipe book. It’s not designed to be read from start to finish.
Each chapter is a collection of tips that are related by a theme, and each tip
demonstrates a particular feature in action. Some tips are self-contained.
Others depend upon material elsewhere in the book. Those tips are cross-
referenced so you can find everything easily.
Modern Vim doesn’t progress from novice to advanced level, but each individ-
ual chapter does. A less-experienced Vim user might prefer to make a first
pass through the book, reading just the early tips in each chapter. A more
advanced user might choose to focus on the later tips or move around the
book as needed. If it helps, you can think of this as a “Choose Your Own
Adventure” book.
A Note on Vim Versions
To follow the tips in this book, you’re going to need an up-to-date installation
of Vim. (The clue is right there in the book’s title!) You have two options: use
version 8 of Vim or version 0.2 of Neovim.
Vim Version 8
Version 8 of Vim was released in September 2016. It introduced some new
features that you’ll learn about in this book, such as packages and job control.
As a minimum requirement, you’ll need to be running version 8 of Vim,
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