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Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor | 
 enlarge | Author: Kim Schulz
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $35.95
You Save: $4.04 (10%)
New (21) Used (6) from $35.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 63828
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 228
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 1847190936
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781847190932
ASIN: 1847190936
Publication Date: May 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New - Excellent condition - Never read or used. No remainder mark. FAST personal service. Free USPS Tracking.
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Product Description
This book contains hacks that cover everything from personalizing Vim according to the user's work cycle to optimizations that will boost the user's productivity. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for experienced Vim users. It is written for Vim 7.0 , the latest stable version. Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality. Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more. - Create, install, and use Vim scripts
- Personalize your work-area
- Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive
Anyone who has worked with Vim and wants to get more out of this legendary text editor can use the hacks from this book. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for more experienced Vim users.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Improving Your Vim Experience June 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book "Hacking Vim" provides a number of tips, hints, setup ideas, scripts, functions, and ways of improving the Vim experience. There are many topics covered, from heavy-duty Vim use for programming to cosmetic aspects of Vim set up. Whether you will get enough out of the book to warrant its $39.99 list price tag depends on your current level of Vim usage, but from my experience most Vim users will find something of use.
The book assumes the reader has a generous familiarity with Vim. Hacking Vim is not a Vim instruction manual or tutorial on basic Vim usage. It will tell you how to use some of Vim's more involved or complicated features. It will not instruct you in basic movement and editing skills.
You must be adept enough with Vim to not be afraid to change its settings and or to learn and use more advanced features of the editor. Intermediate and more advanced users of Vim should have no problem getting useful tips from this book. Beginners with Vim will still find useful information, and may grow into understanding other information the book provides, but make sure Vim is something you want to dedicate a significant amount of time to before buying a book like this.
The book is written in a rather concise style, though the 'tell them what you'll tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them' format is a little pedantic. Part of the book is used to tell the history of Vim, vi, and other vi-like editors, which is marginally useful especially if you are a Vim user for a long time. You may learn something, though, if you have not used other vi-like editors.
Some of the tips in the book cover standard Vim commands, so in this respect the book overlaps with Vim's help system. However, the logical organization of the book into functions helps the user find and understand the material faster and easier. The Vim help system is often confusing to navigate, even for intermediate users. Note that this book does cover using and searching the Vim help system.
The book is mainly written for Vim version 7+. For previous versions of vim and gvim, icons are provided to indicate which are able to use the discussed recipe, tip, or map. This is a nice feature for those using older versions of vim.
Personally, I wanted to read this book just to see if it would teach me something I didn't know. The book was successful in this regard. I learned several things from reading this book, and reminded myself of some things I had forgotten, so it was a worthwhile experience. Seeing how someone else uses Vim, as in this book, is also useful even though I may not always use Vim in the same fashion for my own editing tasks.
 So underwhelmed May 15, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Do not buy this book.
To quote another, what's original is not interesting and what's interesting is not original.
Good amount of information April 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There is a lot of information in this book. It wastes no time or space describing the many ways to make your Vim experience even more efficient than it already is. Because of its very cut and dry style it reads more like a reference book than anything else, but I think that's perfectly fine for this style of book. It is essentially a slightly more readable, more detailed and better written version of a lot of the Vim help. It's also nice because in many of the chapters, especially the first few ("Better Navigation" and "Production Boosters") you can pick up a lot of interesting tips. I even learned a few handy commands I had no idea about.
There are a few things wrong with it though. Some things are too close to the Vim built-in help and you're probably better off just looking there. Also, the index isn't very useful and it'd be nice to have a searchable version of the book as well. Like I said, there is a lot of information in this book. It's not for everyone, but I think most Vim users will find plenty of useful stuff in its pages.
 overpriced, but a pretty good survey April 6, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It's not entirely clear who the target market for this book is. Clearly, someone new to vim is not the audience, because it provides no help for those who are unfamiliar with vi style editors. What it seems best at is covering the features unique to vim, and some (very) basic tutorial like guidance. This is not a book for vim experts, none of the material is anything not found in the documentation to vim, and it's all pretty well known.
That said, putting all this information in one easily digested place is pretty useful, and there's a bit about the scripting engine which I thought was a fairly good introduction to the topic, and there's some vim addon suggestions for programming, writing text, and even some games/unusual addons.
Review of Hacking Vim March 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Hacking Vim is a cookbook for becoming more productive using Vim and GVim. At 200 pages, it is not a large book, but it is packed with recipes and tips. The recipes range from simple stuff, like changing the color scheme, to advanced tasks, like creating and distributing Vim scripts. Some of the recipes apply only to GVim.
The recipes are organized into four categories, each devoted a separate chapter: personalization, navigation, production boosters and advanced formatting. Each chapter contains around ten to fifteen recipes. In addition, there are tips scattered all through the book. In general, I liked the format and the table of contents makes it easy to find a given recipe.
The final chapter is a tutorial for creating Vim scripts, covering everything from development to distribution. Instructions are included for creating the scripts using other programming languages, like Python and Ruby.
The appendices are more useful than in the average book. They include a survey of unusual Vim plugins, like games and mail clients. A sort of bonus recipe about storing the Vim configuration file online is also included.
If you use Vim and are not an expert, I think this is a valuable book to own, though the US $40 price tag seems a little steep to me.
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