7 Habits for effective text editing 2.0

February 27, 2007
Being a Vi enthusiast, I am always on the look out for articles related to Vi, or rather Vi's modern avatar Vim - the versatile text editor created by Bram Moolenaar. In the past, this blog has seen a number of posts related to Vim. In fact if you ask me, the proverb "Too much of a thing" doesn't hold true for Vim.

It can easily take you a life time to learn each and every aspect of Vim though in most cases you can get along quite well by mastering just a couple of Vi commands. The sheer number of features and the permutations and combinations are that many. Then you have branched projects which aim to make Vim much more easier for the average computer user. Cream for Vim being a case to the point.

Today I stumbled upon this video which explains the 7 Habits for effective text editing in Vim which I found informative. The video is one of the series of Google TechTalks. In this video, Bram Moolenaar himself talks on the most efficient ways of editing text in Vim. The regular readers of this blog will know that Bram Moolenaar now works for Google.

The preamble of Google TechTalks goes thus :
Google TeckTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.
The video is a bit large (over 500 MB in size) and stretches over 1 hour. So make sure you have the required bandwidth to view the video. It is every bit worth watching.

5 comments:

  • Vim may be great, but Moolenaar isn't a good speaker. I found the speech "slow" and even boring, even if the hints were good.

  • Ben Williams

    Nice find. I haven't checked out the video yet but people may be interested in Bram's classic article of the same name.

  • Bostic's nvi is vi

  • I would like to collect this kind of video training. Is there a way, I can get a copy of this to watch when offline?

    Cheer,

  • I would like to collect this kind of video training. Is there a way, I can get a copy of this to watch when offline?


    There are several firefox extensions that will allow you to get the video.

    The video isn't bad; actually, I learned a few things, which is a plus.

    PS: With respect to the crowed in the video; they weren't all that lively. Brom tried to crack a few jokes; but the audience didn't respond. Brom has a dry sense of humor. Anyways; it is worth a view.

    Video viewing summary
    ~40 minutes for the presentation
    ~40 minutes for the questions and answers
    Total ~ 1 hour and 20 minutes