Vim Jump to Previous Occurrence

In Vim Normal mode, * searches forward for the next occurrence of word. But what goes back? ...

May 20, 2025

Vim Scratchpad Part 2

Today, I’d like to dive deeper into a part of my practice: using a persisted text file for jotting things down. In this post, I’ll explain the ‘why’ behind this technique, and provide an updated version of it. ...

October 26, 2022

Vim Scratchpad

Today I’d like to share a small part of my practice: using a persisted scratchpad text file for jotting things down. ...

August 25, 2022

Spell Checking with Vim: Tutorial and Best Practices

I write each post for this blog in Vim. Writing in the terminal makes me feel like a programmer, even when I’m not specifically programming. In this post, I’ll share how I spellcheck in Vim. ...

June 15, 2022

Solved! How to Exit Vim "Ex" Mode

How does one exit Vim “Ex” mode? But first… how did you even get into “Ex” mode? ...

April 6, 2022

Why Vim

I’ve been using, teaching, and stanning Vim since almost the beginning of my programming career. Yet, when asked to explain this preference, I stumble. In this post, I’d like to explore why I love Vim. ...

February 23, 2022

My Annotated Vim Configuration File

I love Vim. Folks who’ve programmed with me, or attended a Vim Meetup when I was an organizer, can attest. When I was learning to code, getting fast at Vim changed everything for me. After almost a decade using this editor, here are my personal configurations. ...

November 26, 2020

Vim Nonrecursive Mappings

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out, adding non-recursive Vim mappings to vim-termbux. ...

December 17, 2016

Keyword, Match, and Region in VimScript

After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between keyword, match, and region following syn in a Vim syntax highlighting file. Here’s my answer. ...

April 20, 2016

Vim Buffer Problem

A few weeks back I tackled the following programming challenge from my colleague Josh Branchaud: Vim Buffer I open up a new Vim buffer and type all the numbers 1 to 10,000, separated by spaces. Then, my cat walks on the keyboard and somehow activates a substitution command that replaces all the ‘0’ digits (zeros) with spaces. If I now sum up all the numbers in the buffer, as delineated by spaces, what is the total? ...

March 6, 2016