The Return of "Efficient Editing with Vim"

18 Aug 2015

(A day may come when this blog isn’t non-stop Vim… but it is not this day.)

Before people learned not to mention Vim near me for fear of having a much longer conversation than they’d originally intended, they’d often ask how to get started using Vim. After this happened a few times, I built a “starter kit” message that I’d send out, full of advice and links to help them get going quickly with a minimum of frustration.

One of my favorite articles in this kit was Jonathan McPherson’s “Efficient Editing with Vim.” It did a good, no-nonsense job explaining several key aspects of Vim, and had an up-front emphasis on motions that I really liked.

Unfortunately, Jonathan’s site disappeared from the web a while back, and the article along with it. I thought it might’ve just been moved to a new host, but searches against key phrases mostly came up empty. I was able to find an updated email address, however, so I crossed my fingers and sent Jonathan a note:

Hi. Sorry to bother you out of the blue, but I was hoping you could tell me if there’s an official home for your “Efficient Editing With Vim” article.

I can still get the text from archive.org, and I found a couple of copies of it on random websites, but none of them looked like something you control. I’d really like to send people to the right place.

I’m happy to report that Jonathan responded a couple of days later, and kindly offered to rehost the article on Github pages. You can now find it here…

Efficient Editing with Vim by Jonathan McPherson

…where it will hopefully live a long and happy life. Thanks, Jonathan!

Slides from "See Vim Run. Run, Vim, Run!"

17 Aug 2015

About a week ago, I presented a talk at the SLUUG monthly meeting about all the ways (well, many of the ways) you can use external commands from Vim. Here’s an expanded and annotated PDF version of the slides I used during the presentation:

See Vim Run. Run, Vim, Run!

Shoot me an email if you have any questions or comments.

This Wednesday at SLUUG: "See Vim Run. Run, Vim, Run!"

10 Aug 2015

Come see me present See Vim Run. Run, Vim, Run! at SLUUG this Wednesday, August 12th at 6:30pm. Here’s what it’s about:

Vim is packed with features, but by design, it doesn’t try to do everything. Fortunately, Vim makes it easy to call on other programs for help. We’ll take a look at the many different (and sometimes surprising) ways Vim can run other programs so that their features effectively become part of Vim.

I’ll post the slides here after I give the talk (and after I’ve, you know, created them).

Hope to see you there!

Everything old...

03 Aug 2015

…is, well, still old. But at least it’s all back.

I’ve moved the handful of documents that were on the previous host to the same locations here on the new site. If you’ve got a link to, for example, one of my old Vim presentations, it should work again.

Hello

01 Aug 2015

Hey look! Stuff!

This site’s been a big mostly-blank spot for way too long. It’s time to fix that.

More soon. (Really.)