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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.

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.

vimgrep is Vim’s built-in command for searching across multiple files. It’s not so fast as external tools like ack and git-grep, but it has its uses. vimgrep uses Vim’s built-in regex engine, so you can reuse the patterns that work with Vim’s standard search command.

The :argdo command allows us to execute an Ex command across all buffers in the arglist. To demonstrate, we’ll use the example of running the :substitute command across multiple files, then we’ll see how to revert or save the changes. We’ll also compare the :argdo and :bufdo commands, and consider when it’s appropriate to use each one.

When writing code, we can often save time by duplicating a line then changing one or two parts of that line to make it suit our purposes. In this episode, we’ll compare a few techniques for duplicating lines, and we’ll see that the :copy Ex command is well suited to this task.

For the VimGolf challenge “List the first 100 prime numbers”, there’s a solution that uses a regular expression to detect prime numbers. At 43 keystokes, it’s not the winning solution, but I think it’s the most interesting one. It uses a few clever Vim tricks, including macros, control-a to increment, the very magic pattern switch, and the :global command. There’s a lot to learn from those 43 keystrokes, so let’s study it!

There are times when you can improve the readability of your code by lining up the elements on neighbouring lines. In this episode, I demonstrate how this can be achieved using the Tabular plugin.

This episode focuses on the :edit command. I demonstrate how to open files whose location is relative to the current working directory, then I show how to create a mapping which makes it easier to open files in the same directory as the one in the active window.