Is there a way to see, from within VIM, how a word was determined to be correctly or incorrectly spelled, for example, by displaying the spell file where it is listed?
I don't think there's anything built-in. You will have to write a function that fiddles with the 'spelllang' and 'spellfile' option values, and invoke spellbadword() to check whether it's still recognized. From that, you can deduce which source contains the definition.
So here's my problem. I've gotten exuberant ctags working with Vim, and it works great, most of the time. One thing that still irks me though is whenever I try to search for a function that is named the same as some variable name. I sometimes get the right tag on the first try, sometimes not. Then after I pull up the list of alternate tags with :tselect, it comes up with a list of tags for both function definitions or variable definitions/assignments. (I'm in PHP so definitions and assignments are syntactically indistinguishable).
However, I notice that there's a column labeled 'kind' that has a value of 'f' or 'v', for function and variable, respectively. I can't seem to find a whole lot of information about this field, it seems like it may not be exactly standardized or widely used. My question is: can you filter tag results in Vim by "kind"?
Ideally, the default would be to search the whole tags file, but by specifying some extra flag, you could search a specific ('f' or 'v') kind only.
This is such a small problem for me as it doesn't come up THAT often, but sometimes it's the small problems that really annoy you.
You can certainly generate ctag files with any combination of php-kinds that you want (see the ouput of the command ctags --list-kinds.)
If you feel it's worth the effort you can make a vim function tagkind and bind it to a command. The tagkind function can overwrite the current tags vim variable to point at only the tag file with the kinds that you are interested in and call :tag. Optionally, it can store the previous version of the tags variable and restore it after this one call.
Unfortunately, I don't know of anyway other than this. Perhaps someone else would know.
I generate python ctags with --python-kinds=-i to exclude tags for import statements (which are useless). Maybe you could generate with --php-kinds=-v and drop a class of tags completely.
You can read :help tag-priority. Apparently the "highest-priority" tag is chosen based on some hard-coded logic.
fzf with fzf.vim has a :Tags (for the whole project) and :BTags for the current file option that generates ctags on the fly.
An issue raised on the plugin 'Skip tag kinds in :BTags and :Tags' gives the following code that you can use to only generated tags for a particular kind. I've modified the below so that it should only search for the PHP f kind.
command! BTagsEnhanced
\ call fzf#vim#buffer_tags(<q-args>, [
\ printf('ctags -f - --sort=no --php-kinds=f --excmd=number --language-force=%s %s', &filetype, expand('%:S'))], {})
Note as per my comment on the question, there is a potential Vim tagfinder.vim plugin via a blog post on Vim and Ctags: Finding Tag Definitions. But I haven't tried it.
I want to add a syntax group to all syntaxes. Namely, I want to highlight characters like +,-,*,/ and other punctuation chars for every programming language. I know that I can add a <language>.vim file for every language to my .vim/after/syntax folder, but I want to make this generic. Currently I have to create one such (exactly the same) syntax addendum file for every programming language, and that's... inelegant.
Basically I'd like to place an all.vim file in .vim/after/syntax and have the contents of that file added to every syntax file. I'm fairly sure that this option doesn't exist (I checked the vim docs), so I'm looking for some way to emulate that. Is there perhaps a programmatic way of adding the new syntax group to every syntax?
You could simply place it in your vimrc.
Here's the problem in a nutshell.
I wrote a text file which I need to print out (in a hurry) that contains central european characters (šđčćž/ŠĐČĆŽ).
Vim's encoding settings are as folows;
set encoding=cp1250
set fileencoding=
Upon printing out comes garbage. What should be changed to fix that?
Really hate Vim's frekin' 1001 options in a time like this. Can't it do a simple thing and just print what's on screen?!
Check the option printencoding.
The help says it's empty by default, and when the encoding is multi-byte Vim tries to convert them to the printencoding. Plus, if it's empty "the conversion will be to latin1". This is what may be causing the trouble.
I'd like to ask: why not to use UTF-8?
Background: JEdit (and some other text editors as well) support a feature called Multiple simultaneous text insertion points. (at least that's what I'm calling it here).
To understand what this means, take a look at the link.
Out of all the features in use in modern text editors, initial research seems to indicate that this is one feature that both Emacs and Vim do not actually support. If correct, this would be pretty exceptional since it's quite difficult to find a text editor feature that has not made its way into at least one of these two old-school editors.
Question: Has anyone ever seen or implemented this feature in either Emacs, Vim, or both? If so, please point me to a link, script, reference or summary that explains the details.
If you know an alternate way to do the same (or similar) thing, please let me know.
The vim way to do this is the . command which repeats the last change. So, for instance, if I change a pointer to a reference and I have a bunch of
obj->func
that I want to change to
obj.func
then I search for obj->, do 2cw to change the obj-> to obj., then do n.n.n. until all the instances are changed.
Perhaps not a flexible as what you're talking about, but it works frequently and is very intuitive and fast when it does.
moccur-edit.el almost does what you want. All the locations matching the regexp are displayed, and the editing the matches makes changes in the corresponding source. However, the editing is done on a single instance of the occurrence.
I imagine it'd be straight forward to extend it to allow you to edit them all simultaneously (at least in the simple case).
There is a demo of it found here.
Turns out, the newest versions of moccur-edit don't apply changes in real-time - you must apply the changes. The changes are also now undoable (nice win).
In EMACS, you could/would do it with M-x find-grep and a macro. If you really insist that it be fully automatic, then you'd include the find-next in the macro.
But honestly, this strikes me as a sort of Microsoft-feature: yes, it adds to the feature list, but why bother? And would you remember it existed in six months, when you want to use it again?
For emacs, multiple-cursors does exactly that.
Have a look at emacsrocks episode 13, by the author of the module.
I don't think this feature has a direct analogue in either Emacs or Vim, which is not to say that everything achievable with this feature is not possible in some fashion with the two 'old-school' editors. And like most things Emacs and Vim, power-users would probably be able to achieve such a task exceedingly quickly, even if mere mortals like myself could spend five minutes figuring out the correct grep search and replace with appropriate back-references, for example.
YASnippet package for Emacs uses it. See 2:13 and 2:44 in the screencast.
Another slight similarity: In Emacs, the rectangle editing features provided by cua-selection-mode (or cua-mode) automatically gives you multiple insertion points down the left or right edge of the marked rectangle, so that you can type a common prefix or suffix to all of those lines.
e.g.:
M-x cua-selection-mode RET (enable the global minor mode, if you don't already use this or cua-mode)
C-RET down down down (marks a 1x3 character rectangle)
type prefix here
C-RET (unmark the rectangle to return to normal editing)
It should be something like this in vim:
%s/paint.\((.*),/\1.paint(/
Or something like that, I am really bad at "mock" regular expressions.
The idea is substitute the pattern:
/paint(object,/
with
/object.paint(/
So, yes, it is "supported"
It seemed simple to do a basic version of this in Emacs lisp. This is for when you just want two places to insert text in parallel:
(defun cjw-multi-insert (text)
"insert text at both point and mark"
(interactive "sText:")
(insert-before-markers text)
(save-excursion
(exchange-point-and-mark)
(insert-before-markers text)))
When you run it, it prompts for text and inserts it at both point (current position) and mark. You can set the mark with C-SPC. This could be easily extended for N different positions. A function like set-insert-point would record current position (stored as an Emacs marker) into a list and then when you run the multi-insert command, it just iterates through the list adding text at each.
I'm not sure about what would a simple way to handle a more general "multi-editing" feature.
Nope. This would be quite difficult to do with a primarily console-based UI.
That said, there is similar features in vim (and emacs, although I've not used it nearly as much) - search and replace, as people have said, and more similarly, column insert mode: http://pivotallabs.com/users/brian/blog/articles/350-column-edit-mode-in-vi