If we type :help in vim, read the vim help file, and see a blue (or say green-blue) word, that word is a link. We can put the cursor in the word, and press Ctrl-] on the keyboard, then we go to the linked contents.
I am new to .rst files. My question is, when I read a .rst file, and see a blue (or say green-blue) word, can I press any key so I can go to the linked contents?
The reason these "links" work in the help files is because vim have created tags files for you.
Find a proper program to generate tags file rst and you will be able to jump to these as well.
See :help 29.1 for more information.
reStructuredText has lots of kinds of hyperlinks, that Vim may or may not be able to follow natively or with a little help.
Implementing all that sounds like a fun Saturday afternoon project but, if you are in a hurry, you might want to take a look at gu-fan/riv.vim which provides hyperlink navigation, among many other things.
When it comes to external links like HTTP: and things like that, just type gx in normal mode. See also this link: https://sbulav.github.io/vim/neovim-opening-urls/
Related
I need to set some text to be hyperlinked to a website via the vim editor. How do I accomplish that?
Vim is not a word processor. Vim displays text exactly as it is on the disk. You can do some minor "formatting" of text such as folding lines, syntax highlighting, concealing a few characters, but that's it. None of this information is actually stored in the file itself, instead, it is applied from "outside the file" with Vim. This is different from .doc files, where the formatting is stored in the file.
Note that gx opens links. Perhaps this is what you want?
What you want can maybe be done with:
A conceal pattern combined with some custom mappings. I haven't tried doing this, but it's probably possible.
The only way to "link" something in Vim is to another file using tags. See :help tags-and-searches. Perhaps this feature can be abused into opening web pages, I don't suggest that you try.
In short, you're trying to use Vim for a task it wasn't really designed to do, so doing that will be hard and ugly, if possible at all.
If you don't require a link that can be "clicked" with a mouse and don't mind having some extra text showing you can use the utl (universal text link) plugin. Get the details at https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=293. It is old, but still works for me. To link to google for instance the text would have < url:www.google.com > in the text. To use the link, move your cursor somewhere on or between the brackets and input \gu from command mode. This will cause your browser to go to Google's site. Of course there is some setup in the utl_rc.vim file to point it at your browser.
I should also note that you can use this to move between text files, or within a file as well. The details are at the link I gave above.
I installed Latex-Suite for Vim, and I like it very much, but I'd like to be able to customize the environment mappings that came by default, and add new ones. For example I want to edit the equation environment that appears typing EEQ and move around some elements, like the \label{} command. How can I do this? I've been scanning everything inside my /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/ftplugin but I can't find a way to do it (or I just don't understand what those files are).
You want to check out the documentation on Macro Customisation, specifically the Tex_Env_{name} bit.
In short, if you want your theorem snippet to look like
\begin{theorem}
<++>
\end{theorem}<++>
then you want a line like
let g:Tex_Env_theorem = "\\begin{theorem}\<CR><++>\<CR>\\end{theorem}"
in your vimrc.
Note the backslashes to escape carriage-return, and double-backslash for normal backslashes.
The <F5> functionality (press F5 after typing an environment name, i.e. figure<F5>) should work out of the box, but you may need to refresh the three-letter code. This is more hassle than it needs to be, but something like
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.tex call IMAP('EFI', g:Tex_Env_figure,'tex')
will do the job.
The answer to the question you asked comes with a caveat, which is that Latex-Suite is an enormous amount of code that is very hard and annoying to modify, and which does not play nicely with other plugins. This falls into Latex-Suite's philosophy that it's the only plugin you need for editing latex within vim.
That said, you want to look in /path/to/ftplugin/latex-suite/envmacros.vim. Searching for EEQ will lead you on the path to understanding the set of calls that latex-suite performs. I would like to reiterate that many functions are deeply intertwined.
On the other hand, there is a very easy way to have very easily customizable environments, which are snippets. See the UltiSnips page for a good example of how this works. These are designed for customization and extremely easy to write.
Is there a VIM absolute (registers, marks, undo history, tags) bar or tree toggle ?
I mean, like the tag-bar, but with subsections. Having the primary sections to be the followings, custom marks, custom registers, custom records, undo history (as the Gundo plug-in). So undo the bar, we can go to a mark, execute a record, yank or paste a register, etc.....
If there is not, would anyone like to help me build it??? Or just, help me with good starting tutorials for vim plug-in building, since it'll be the first one that I'll make.
No, there's nothing like that, what would be the point of such a monster?
Aren't :marks, :registers, :changes, :undolist… enough?
Anyway, you should start by getting familiar with Vim's built-in documentation: :help eval contains all the raw info you will need.
Steve Losh's Learn Vimscript the Hard Way is a really great third party ressource and the Vim Wiki can be useful, too.
Though plugins like tagbar and Gundo efficiently display information in a side bar, like IDEs, this is mostly a concession to what today's users are used to, but not a fundamental way to use vi(m). Marks and registers are meant to be memorized by their names (a..z), with the :marks, :registers, etc. commands to provide you a refresher after a long break / the next day.
There are many plugins (e.g. for automatic mark management and visualization), but I would recommend to use them sparingly. It's definitely a "smell" if you want to turn Vim into a full-blown IDE. Please don't.
How do you manage big projects (hundreds of files) using only VIM?
I personally start having problems in any larger than small project.
is there any way to quickly 'go to file', preferably with name completition?
same for 'go to class definition', when it is in another file
I kinda know all the VIM basics, so I don't have problem using it for writing scripts or quick editing some source code. But it gets really messy for me when I have to navigate between files.
VIM has excellent support for tags. Once you have created a tags file for your project, you can jump to a definition or declaration of a method, class, etc., including jumping across files, all inside the same editing session.
Try
:help tags
To generate a tags file for C/C++, go to your shell prompt (I'm assuming your system is *nix/Cygwin) and type
info ctags
or
ctags --help
I like simple solutions, my favorite way to navigate at the moment is:
Add to ~/.vimrc.local
set path=$PWD/**
Then type this in the editor to find the file anywhere in the current working directory (pwd)
:find user_spec.rb
You can use tab-completion on the filenames to find multiple choices as well, making this TextMate convert very happy.
I use a combination of NERDTree (directory sidebar), FuzzyFinder Textmate (go-to-file like TextMate's CMD+T), and Sessions (:h sessions) to help me deal with large projects.
I would suggest using some sessions helper plugin. I would mention what I use, but I'm not satisfied with it yet. Just Google "vim sessions".
One thing to note with getting FuzzyFinder Textmate to work is that it depends on an old version the FuzzyFinder plugin, specifically v2.16. Anything higher and you'll get errors. But it's definitely worth the trouble. While it doesn't have name completion, its search is smart so if I search for fro/time/actionsphp it will pull up the file apps/(fro)ntend/modules/(time)_tracking/actions/(actions).class.(php) (parenthesis denote what it's matching). It makes it very easy to pick out files that are only unique by their folder name.
As well as the invaluable ctags and the various associated commands. I also couldn't live without the project plugin, which allows you to have the files of interest associated with a project in a separate pane. I can't remember how much of my setup is customised, but if I want to open a source file called Debug.c, I hit:
<F12> " Opens the project pane
/De " Searches for "De", which is likely to be enough to find Debug.c or possibly Debug.h
<ENTER> " Opens the selected file and closes the project pane
I often then do:
:vsp " Vertically split the window
<F12> " Reopen project pane
# " Search back to find previous entry with the same name (to find
Debug.h if I was on Debug.c: my headers are in Headers/ and
my source is in Source/, so the headers come earlier in the list
than the source). I use * to go the other way, obviously.
<ENTER> " Open the header file in the other window and close the project window.
With this relatively short sequence, I can open any file and it's header in a vertical split. Since the project plugin window is just a text file, completion is achieved by using Vim's searching capability.
Starting in Vim 7.3, the :find command has tab-completion of filenames.
So if you set your 'path' option to contain your entire project (probably using the ** wildcard to allow recursively searching subdirectories), then you can use the :find, :sfind, :tabfind, etc. commands with completion to get to any file in your project. This also allows jumping to files directly with gf and friends if the file name is in your text, for example in an include directive.
With this method, no external tools or plugins are needed for navigating to specific files. Although, it may admittedly not be as fast or easy to use, and doesn't address the need for jumping to definitions. For definitions, I use ctags as other answers suggest.
If you are using ctags as other posters have recommended, then make sure you look at the taglist plugin.
Make sure you take the time to read the docs and learn the key bindings. Here are a few to get you started (from the TList window):
o - open file in new window
t - open file in new tab
[[ or backspace - previous file in list
]] or tab - next file in list
Exuberant ctags.
Use Ctrl-] to jump to the tag under the cursor.
Opening vim from root of your source file and extending path option to include all sub-directories therein.
For example set path+=/usr/include/c++/** for C++ headers and set path+=** for your source directory.
This ,then, opens a plethora of following possibilities.
1) Opening file by name or parts of it
:find file_name
You can use auto-completion and wildcard expansion with :find reliably. You type the name, it will locate the name. This works language agnostic.I am sure you will like it.
2) Navigating to files under cusror:
if you want to go a file path like #include "project/path/classA.h.
gf or gF - go to file under cursor.
Ctrl-6 - to come back to last cursor position after gf or gF
3) API lookup and navigating to the API location
[i or [I can be used to look up your function signature for word under cursor without leaving your workspace. [<Tab> to actually go to declaration. Use Ctrl-6 to come back to last location.
Without extending path, you can start navigating files by :Ex command and navigate and open your file. I prefer NerdTree over this though.
I use FindFile. If you open vim at the root of your project and run :FC . the plugin will cache all the filenames beneath your cwd. You can then do :FF to open a completion menu and type the name of the file you want (or rather, the first few letters).
Although I'm kinda hoping someone will point out a better solution so I can learn something, NERDTree has been good to me for getting to specific files with name completion as long as I have the tree expanded. The command when I need to get to a file is something like:
,d/foo.pyo (where foo.py is a file name)
,d to open the tree, / to enter search mode, the name (or partial name, or regex, or whatever) of the file, and then o to open.
Of course you may have to hit 'n' a few times if you didn't type enough of the filename or there are duplicates.
I admit it feels like a bit of a hack using NERDTree like this although it has gotten so far into my muscle memory by now that I don't even think about it.
Of course I use ctags too but those are only useful when you have a function near the cursor and need to get to its definition in another file or something. A lot of times I say "OK, I need to work on feature x now" and need to navigate to another file without any references nearby that ctags would really help with.
I'm using two plugins of mine:
searchInRuntime that completes filenames on command line. It is somehow similar to fuzzyfinder and lookupfile,
lh-tags which is completely experimental and undocumented. It offers two features: automatic and quick update of the tagfile on file save(ing?), and a tag selector plugged to <c-w><m-down> by default. You may want to check the renowned taglist plugin instead.
Both require my viml library lh-vim-lib.
Try SourceCodeObedinece. This one I developed to handle C++ 1Gb source files project.
I use it in pair with 0scan.
These two plugins are wrappers around the most popular Vim browsing tools: ctags and cscope.
I have looked at the ability to use tabs in Vim (with :tabe, :tabnew, etc.) as a replacement for my current practice of having many files open in the same window in hidden buffers.
I would like every distinct file that I have open to always be in its own tab. However, there are some things that get in the way of this. How do I fix these:
When commands like gf and ^] jump to a location in another file, the file opens in a new buffer in the current tab. Is there a way to have all of these sorts of commands open the file in a new tab, or switch to the existing tab with the file if it is already open?
When switching buffers I can use
:b <part of filename><tab>
and it will complete the names of files in existing buffers. <part of filename> can even be the middle of a filename instead of the beginning. Is there an equivalent for switching tabs?
Stop, stop, stop.
This is not how Vim's tabs are designed to be used. In fact, they're misnamed. A better name would be "viewport" or "layout", because that's what a tab is—it's a different layout of windows of all of your existing buffers.
Trying to beat Vim into 1 tab == 1 buffer is an exercise in futility. Vim doesn't know or care and it will not respect it on all commands—in particular, anything that uses the quickfix buffer (:make, :grep, and :helpgrep are the ones that spring to mind) will happily ignore tabs and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
Instead:
:set hidden
If you don't have this set already, then do so. It makes vim work like every other multiple-file editor on the planet. You can have edited buffers that aren't visible in a window somewhere.
Use :bn, :bp, :b #, :b name, and ctrl-6 to switch between buffers. I like ctrl-6 myself (alone it switches to the previously used buffer, or #ctrl-6 switches to buffer number #).
Use :ls to list buffers, or a plugin like MiniBufExpl or BufExplorer.
Bit late to the party here but surprised I didn't see the following in this list:
:tab sball - this opens a new tab for each open buffer.
:help switchbuf - this controls buffer switching behaviour, try :set switchbuf=usetab,newtab. This should mean switching to the existing tab if the buffer is open, or creating a new one if not.
Vim :help window explains the confusion "tabs vs buffers" pretty well.
A buffer is the in-memory text of a file.
A window is a viewport
on a buffer.
A tab page is a collection of windows.
Opening multiple files is achieved in vim with buffers. In other editors (e.g. notepad++) this is done with tabs, so the name tab in vim maybe misleading.
Windows are for the purpose of splitting the workspace and displaying multiple files (buffers) together on one screen. In other editors this could be achieved by opening multiple GUI windows and rearranging them on the desktop.
Finally in this analogy vim's tab pages would correspond to multiple desktops, that is different rearrangements of windows.
As vim help: tab-page explains a tab page can be used, when one wants to temporarily edit a file, but does not want to change anything in the current layout of windows and buffers. In such a case another tab page can be used just for the purpose of editing that particular file.
Of course you have to remember that displaying the same file in many tab pages or windows would result in displaying the same working copy (buffer).
Contrary to some of the other answers here, I say that you can use tabs however you want. vim was designed to be versatile and customizable, rather than forcing you to work according to predefined parameters. We all know how us programmers love to impose our "ethics" on everyone else, so this achievement is certainly a primary feature.
<C-w>gf is the tab equivalent of buffers' gf command. <C-PageUp> and <C-PageDown> will switch between tabs. (In Byobu, these two commands never work for me, but they work outside of Byobu/tmux. Alternatives are gt and gT.) <C-w>T will move the current window to a new tab page.
If you'd prefer that vim use an existing tab if possible, rather than creating a duplicate tab, add :set switchbuf=usetab to your .vimrc file. You can add newtab to the list (:set switchbuf=usetab,newtab) to force QuickFix commands that display compile errors to open in separate tabs. I prefer split instead, which opens the compile errors in a split window.
If you have mouse support enabled with :set mouse=a, you can interact with the tabs by clicking on them. There's also a + button by default that will create a new tab.
For the documentation on tabs, type :help tab-page in normal mode. (After you do that, you can practice moving a window to a tab using <C-w>T.) There's a long list of commands. Some of the window commands have to do with tabs, so you might want to look at that documentation as well via :help windows.
Addition: 2013-12-19
To open multiple files in vim with each file in a separate tab, use vim -p file1 file2 .... If you're like me and always forget to add -p, you can add it at the end, as vim follows the normal command line option parsing rules. Alternatively, you can add a bash alias mapping vim to vim -p.
I ran into the same problem. I wanted tabs to work like buffers and I never quite manage to get them to. The solution that I finally settled on was to make buffers behave like tabs!
Check out the plugin called Mini Buffer Explorer, once installed and configured, you'll be able to work with buffers virtaully the same way as tabs without losing any functionality.
This is an answer for those not familiar with Vim and coming from other text editors (in my case Sublime Text).
I read through all these answers and it still wasn't clear. If you read through them enough things begin to make sense, but it took me hours of going back and forth between questions.
The first thing is, as others have explained:
Tab Pages, sound a lot like tabs, they act like tabs and look a lot like tabs in most other GUI editors, but they're not. I think it's an a bad mental model that was built on in Vim, which unfortunately clouds the extra power that you have within a tab page.
The first description that I understood was from #crenate's answer is that they are the equivalent to multiple desktops. When seen in that regard you'd only ever have a couple of desktops open but have lots of GUI windows open within each one.
I would say they are similar to in other editors/browsers:
Tab groupings
Sublime Text workspaces (i.e. a list of the open files that you have in a project)
When you see them like that you realise the power of them that you can easily group sets of files (buffers) together e.g. your CSS files, your HTML files and your JS files in different tab pages. Which is actually pretty awesome.
Other descriptions that I find confusing
Viewport
This makes no sense to me. A viewport which although it does have a defined dictionary term, I've only heard referring to Vim windows in the :help window doc. Viewport is not a term I've ever heard with regards to editors like Sublime Text, Visual Studio, Atom, Notepad++. In fact I'd never heard about it for Vim until I started to try using tab pages.
If you view tab pages like multiple desktops, then referring to a desktop as a single window seems odd.
Workspaces
This possibly makes more sense, the dictionary definition is:
A memory storage facility for temporary use.
So it's like a place where you store a group of buffers.
I didn't initially sound like Sublime Text's concept of a workspace which is a list of all the files that you have open in your project:
the sublime-workspace file, which contains user specific data, such as the open files and the modifications to each.
However thinking about it more, this does actually agree. If you regard a Vim tab page like a Sublime Text project, then it would seem odd to have just one file open in each project and keep switching between projects. Hence why using a tab page to have open only one file is odd.
Collection of windows
The :help window refers to tab pages this way. Plus numerous other answers use the same concept. However until you get your head around what a vim window is, then that's not much use, like building a castle on sand.
As I referred to above, a vim window is the same as a viewport and quiet excellently explained in this linux.com article:
A really useful feature in Vim is the ability to split the viewable area between one or more files, or just to split the window to view two bits of the same file more easily. The Vim documentation refers to this as a viewport or window, interchangeably.
You may already be familiar with this feature if you've ever used Vim's help feature by using :help topic or pressing the F1 key. When you enter help, Vim splits the viewport and opens the help documentation in the top viewport, leaving your document open in the bottom viewport.
I find it odd that a tab page is referred to as a collection of windows instead of a collection of buffers. But I guess you can have two separate tab pages open each with multiple windows all pointing at the same buffer, at least that's what I understand so far.
You can map commands that normally manipulate buffers to manipulate tabs, as I've done with gf in my .vimrc:
map gf :tabe <cfile><CR>
I'm sure you can do the same with [^
I don't think vim supports this for tabs (yet). I use gt and gT to move to the next and previous tabs, respectively. You can also use Ngt, where N is the tab number. One peeve I have is that, by default, the tab number is not displayed in the tab line. To fix this, I put a couple functions at the end of my .vimrc file (I didn't paste here because it's long and didn't format correctly).
I use buffers like tabs, using the BufExplorer plugin and a few macros:
" CTRL+b opens the buffer list
map <C-b> <esc>:BufExplorer<cr>
" gz in command mode closes the current buffer
map gz :bdelete<cr>
" g[bB] in command mode switch to the next/prev. buffer
map gb :bnext<cr>
map gB :bprev<cr>
With BufExplorer you don't have a tab bar at the top, but on the other hand it saves space on your screen, plus you can have an infinite number of files/buffers open and the buffer list is searchable...
Looking at
:help tabs
it doesn't look like vim wants to work the way you do...
Buffers are shared across tabs, so it doesn't seem possible to lock a given buffer to appear only on a certain tab.
It's a good idea, though.
You could probably get the effect you want by using a terminal that supports tabs, like multi-gnome-terminal, then running vim instances in each terminal tab. Not perfect, though...
If you want buffers to work like tabs, check out the tabline plugin.
That uses a single window, and adds a line on the top to simulate the tabs (just showing the list of buffers). This came out a long time ago when tabs were only supported in GVim but not in the command line vim. Since it is only operating with buffers, everything integrates well with the rest of vim.
relevant:
Vim: can global marks switch tabs instead of the file in the current tab?
maybe useful to solve a little part of OP's problem:
nno \ <Cmd>call To_global_mark()<cr>
fun! To_global_mark()
-tab drop /tmp/useless.md
exe 'normal! `' .. toupper(input("To global mark: "))
endf