Vimcasts

Enhanced abbreviations with :Abolish

Vim’s built-in abbreviation feature is handy if you want to auto-correct words that you frequently misspell, but it requires a lot of setup. The :Abolish command makes it easy to generate abbreviations that will correct multiple forms of the same word.

This is the final of a three-part series on Tim Pope’s abolish plugin.

Supercharged substitution with :Subvert

The abolish plugin provides a command called :Subvert, which is like a supercharged version of Vim’s built-in :substitute command. The :Subvert command is especially useful for changing singular and plural variants of a word, and for refactoring names that appear in snake_case and MixedCase.

This is part two of a three-part series on Tim Pope’s abolish plugin.

Smart search with :Subvert

The :Subvert command lets us create a particular style of regular expressions with ease. It’s great for matching irregular singular and plural words in plain English and also for variable names that come in snake_case and MixedCase forms.

This is part one of a three-part series on Tim Pope’s abolish plugin.

Search for the selected text

The * command searches for the word under the cursor. That makes sense in Normal mode, but from Visual mode it would be more useful if the star command searched for the current selection, rather than the current word. We can add this feature to Vim using the visual star search plugin.

Project-wide find and replace

Vim doesn’t have a built-in command for project-wide find and replace operations, but we can perform this task by combining primitive Ex commands such as :substitute, :argdo, and :vimgrep. We’ll look at two possible strategies: first using the arglist, then the quickfix list.