Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Stop using colon commands in vim

Posted 30 May 2012 @ 11am in vim

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[...] Stop using colon commands in vim [...]

I have to say that I really hate this idea. Key chords destroy one of Vim’s primary advantages: the ability to touch-type commands. Colon commands are not as bad as using command/control/alt key chords because they can be touch-typed, but I do agree that they are a problem. They require at least one extra key just to get the colon.

My way of dealing with this is to remap the semicolon to the colon and the colon to the semicolon. It’s a small change, but makes a big difference in speed and convenience. Window navigation in Vim is one of those features that relies on key chords, but shouldn’t. It’s jarring to use this feature as delivered. I have leader set to comma and ,w mapped to ctrl-w.

Buffer management can also be time consuming. This mapping helps with that:
nnoremap b :buffers:b

In case your blog strips what looks like markup tags from comments, that was:
nnoremap leader b :buffers cr :b Space

Anyway, the whole point of mappings like these is to reduce the need for chords of any kind so that I can lock my eyes onto the text and let my fingers type one key at a time.

Thanks for your comment Scott.

Yes the semicolon remap is nice, I used it for a while myself but then decided instead to learn to use the semicolon more often (still working on that), and to avoid the colon commands.

I do map leader b for buffers (except I use CtrlPBuffer instead of the native buffer feature), so I agree with that.

I guess chords vs touch type is a matter of taste, but if you’re typing a colon command you have to hit enter at the end of it. My most common tasks like running an rspec or opening a related spec to the file I’m looking at are all single key chords which are much faster than hitting enter after typing any combination of things.

Of course I also use the kinesis advantage keyboard which means all my modifier keys are immediately under my thumb and my hands never leave the home row position, e ver.

I fixed the comments, you can now use code tags.

I’m not that good with Vim but doesn’t Ex Mode offer a lot? Moving, deleting and applying macros to ranges is a lot more efficient when using Ex Mode commands than having to select a visual block and then doing stuff. It’s also more repeatable and changeable than doing things in Visual Mode.

I agree that certain commands that a) have no dynamic components like :bnext or starting your tests or whatever and b) are used quite often could benefit from a chorded mapping.

Sure there are many good uses of Ex mode, I just mean to say that all the trivial usages should be avoided for efficiency.