Vim video screenshot demonstrations

Vim is a powerful editor written by Bram Moolenaar. From the vim.org page:

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

I discovered Vim because a fanatical coworker would not stop harassing me to try it. I ignored him for years before I finally did, and kick myself for every day that I waited. I now do all programming in Vim; as the intro suggests, it does everything a basic IDE does and more.

All the demos below were created in one try, without retakes, so what you see is about how fast I really edit when I'm working. Assuming the utility I used to create the videos (vnc2swf) worked right, the videos should be in real time. I'm not particularly fast for a Vim user, especially since I've only been using Vim a year or so. Even though I don't type that fast, the power of Vim to enable me to do a lot in a few keystrokes should be evident. I never touch the mouse during any of these demos except at the end to stop the recording program.

I came up with the demo ideas as I was working on real code, and what you see is the code I'm working on for my graduate research project. You can restart the videos by right-clicking inside the video and using the options menu. You can reload the page too, but my poor wimpy DSL will probably die. The demo videos below require a Shockwave Flash compatible player.

• Duplicating text in Vim
• Finding regular expressions (such as variable names) in Vim
• Yanking headers in Vim
• Adding a parameter to a function
• Interactive find and Replace across lots of files

If you decide to try Vim, keep in mind that this is an extremely powerful tool. You wouldn't expect to learn how to cut diamonds in a day, and you won't learn Vim in a day either. In fact, you'll just be getting started after a week, but if you spend any significant amount of time text editing, you will pay back the weeks you spend learning Vim many times over in faster and more powerful editing.

The one modification I recommend is to remap your Caps-Lock key to ESC so that you don't have to try and hit the ESC key way off in the distance from home row with your pinky. The ESC key is used a lot with Vim, and this one little change makes a huge difference. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do. On X11 systems, you can change the keymapping in /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86 or similar. If you know how to do this on other systems contact me and I'll post it here.