VimCasts.org

I’ve been collaborating with thoughtbot to produce three screencasts about Navigating Ruby Files with Vim. There’s 40 minutes of material in total, and it’s available from today. You can purchase these videos for $19, but they will also be available to thoughtbot Prime subscribers. Check out learn.thoughtbot.com for more details.

I’ve just published episode 50 of Vimcasts. That feels like a significant milestone and a good time to consider the question: what’s next?

I sometimes get asked what software I use to reveal the Vim keystrokes in my video tutorials here on Vimcasts.org. The fact is that I add them by hand in post-production. It’s not fun!

At the April Vim London meetup, we managed for the first time to record and publish videos of the talks. Check out the VimLondon Vimeo page to see all talks from our April and May meetups.

I was pleased to be invited to chat with Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen on the GitMinutes podcast recently. It’s now live! Head over to Episode #8 of Git Minutes and have a listen.

One year ago today, Practical Vim was released as a beta book. I’m thrilled with how the book has been received and I’d like to thank everybody who has purchased a copy. After a year of sales, I’m happy to report that Practical Vim is a best-seller!

I always announce my Online Vim Masterclasses here on the Vimcasts blog as well as on Twitter. Some of you have indicated that you’d prefer to get announcements in your email inbox, so I’ve set up a mailing list for announcements. Sign up for the newsletter and you’ll be the first to hear about upcoming Vim classes.

The vimgrep command uses Vim’s native regular expressions to search the contents of multiple files. There are several ways that we can specify the list of files to look inside, including * and ** wildcards. It would be handy if we could instruct vimgrep to look inside all of the files in the current project, excluding those listed in the .gitignore file. That’s where the git ls-files command comes in.

I love the way that ack let’s me specify the files to search inside. For starters, ack does the right thing by ignoring the contents of VCS directories, backup files, core dumps etc., which gives a good signal to noise ratio. On top of that, ack provides a convenient syntax for specifying filetypes to include or exclude from the set (see ack --help-types). I can target ruby files only with the --ruby option, or everything but ruby files with --noruby.

Here’s a quick tip: if you can’t find what you’re looking for in Vim’s built-in documentation, use a search engine instead. All of Vim’s documentation is online at vimdoc.sourceforge.net, so it’s indexed by Google & Co. If you create a custom search engine for your browser, then you can easily limit your searches to only return results from vimdoc.sourceforge.net.