This is a small collection of (n)vim features (or plugins) saving me from horrendously boring and repetitive work. It’s mostly a combination of *nix programs and macros, but (n)vim provides plenty of useful shortcuts per default.
I have a fixed layout for images on my website. In addition, each
image is clickable and redirects to the full-sized version which can be
found in the hq folder. Including many images can be made
easy using the output redirect command .! in combination
with a macro adding HTML tags. You might know that (n)vim has registers
which can be set as a source/target using "<reg> for
yanking and pasting, but macros are also stored in these registers.
Macros are nothing more than a recording of actions you did and can be
created by pressing q<reg> once to start and stop the
recording and executed using @<reg>. I persist my
macros in a macros.lua file which contains lines like:
vim.fn.setreg('i', 'i<figure><a href=?rkbkb"/res/panzermuseum/jklxAjkbbby$A"><img src="/res/panzermuseum/hq/jkpA"jkxA/></a>\r<fpkbigcaption></figcaption></figure>jk0j')Executing a macro multiple times to edit lots of text at once can be
done by a simple prefix. As an example, I will format the pictures I
took when visiting the german tank museum by first listing everything in
res/panzermuseum/ and then running the macro:
I was transferring a project from cmake to meson the other day and
needed to find a way to manually list all source files as I was using
globbing before. Fortunately, this is quite simple as vim provides a
feature to execute a command and paste its output directly in the editor
using .! in command mode. I can then select the files using
vip (visual select inner paragraph) and combine
norm with ysiW'A, (surround inner word with ’
- see vim-surround)
to put quotes around each file and commata at the end. Adding brackets
can be done with ysip[ (surround inner paragraph with [).
Finally, we compact the array using gqip (format lines
inner paragraph - this respects the file type and actual content by
the way so nothing actually breaks).
More often than not people like to use a language server when programming for things like auto-completion of expressions and quickly looking up documentation. While lots of IDEs might support their respective languages quite well (intellij java completion for example is great), it’s generally hard to add additional language support. Fortunately, editors like vim and visual studio code provide an excellent way to include language servers. Adding autocompletion features for a new language is made simple by the use of the language server protocol, or LSP for short. The basic idea is that semantic completion and analysis features are provided by a specific language server like ccls speaking the LSP. The editor then only needs to speak the LSP as well to gain near infinite completion power.
While neovim has LSP support built in, I like to use coc.nvim which is a nodejs extension host. Using coc, you can install a myriad of glue plugins that allow the editor to communicate with the language servers. Coc provides a simple way to install plugins which, in combination with a package manager and sensible defaults, makes it excellent in quickly setting up completion for your new esolang, given a language server has been implemented by a third party.
As an example, I’ve begun to learn clojure a while ago, a LISP-related, JVM-based functional programming language. There might be a clojure IDE, or there might be none - I didn’t looked it up. The only thing I had to do to properly set up my editor was executing two commands:
yay -S clojure-lsp:CocInstall coc-clojureThe first command was used to install the language server and the second one to install the glue plugin. It automatically activates when editing clojure files and works wonders. Supported features include not only autocompletion, but things like jumping to definitions, finding references, renaming symbols and even inserting snippets.
In the wake of moving over to Lua and saying goodbye to vimscript (I don’t miss it), I now use builtin native LSP support from neovim which in my opinion is superior to a node-based extension host.