Saari Development

I had seen other vim experts do this but couldn’t remember how they did. Today I finally search and found how to insert the output of a unix/linux command directly in a vim buffer(without copy-pasting).

  :r!ls /home/

or in the visual mode (by pressing V) simply !ls /home/

Simple isn’t it and quite useful at times.

I realized the power of :g much later than many other commands in vim and I think this one has been there even in vi for a long time.

Here is a great tip that covers the virtues of :g in vim:

Tip #227: Power of :g

The reason I ended up with this tip was that I needed to find a simple command that would delete all lines matching a pattern.

I knew how to delete all lines that matched a pattern.

:g/pattern/d

but I was looking for the inverse and I found it :g’s cousin :v in the above tip as a user comment.

:v/patter/d

did the job very well. Once again vim saved the day.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like my gVim real estate to be polluted by toolbar under the menus so in my early days of using gVim I researched and discovered a way to turn them off.

Here is what you need to put in your .gvimrc (or _gvimrc on windows):

" To set the toolbars off (icons on top of the screen)set guioptions-=T

I always struggled with this on my windows Vim and today I saw the fix on a vim users mailing list addressing this exact question.

Here is the way to set height (lines) of gVim (graphical Vim) window:

:set lines=40

and here is how to set width (columns) of gVim windows:

:set columns=80