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Alex Young posted “Vim for TextMate fans” a couple of years back, in which he ponders how to get the best of both worlds:

I’ve used vim a lot over the years, mainly because I spent a long time using Linux and it was there so I used it. The choice was obvious: vim or vi were on almost every machine I had access to, and worked excellently both locally and remotely. Once I’d learnt the basics I was set, I knew enough to get my work done.

Then I found TextMate for Mac OS. The immediacy of TextMate made it easy to get started with, and it has many excellent features. The problem is, I’m not always using a Mac. But you know who’ll follow me around to every platform I use? Good old vim! So I started thinking, how could I make vim feel more like TextMate?

Check out his screencast for more.

Abhijit Nadgouda over at iface thoughts describes a method of using vim as a simple wiki system, utilizing its built-in “tags” capability.

One thing I have learnt from experience is that the tool to collect and organize our information must be easily available and easy to use. And that is where vim scores higher than any other tool to build a wiki.[…]

Nowadays I use the vim as a combination of wiki and outliner to record my ideas and thoughts, documentation, tasks and even contacts.

Looks very easy to set up and use — I think I’ll give it a try.

A couple of days ago, Slashdot posted a story asking about “(Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?”:

So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old ‘write’ command (as I’ve been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn’t know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there’s probably lots of things like that, and likely things I’ve never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been over 2200 comments exploring the arcana of the Unix and Unixy command line. A lot of awesome lore to check out.

Yesterday came the next story, “(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?”:

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what’s out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?

570+ comments later, there’s a lot to check out there as well.

Today’s post was inevitable, “(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?”:

Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let’s hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like ‘M-x dunnet’ ;-)

200 comments and counting.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Vim story, apart from the various spiffy command tips and tricks, were links to other sites. Here are a couple, along with a few related others I’ve linked to before.

• Best Vim Tips (Wikia) (at the Vim Tips Wiki)
• Efficient Editing With vim
• GTD with Vim
• Vimperator - Firefox add-on that makes the browser look and feel like vim.
• Word War vi - “A retro styled side scrolling shoot’em up arcade game for linux. Your mission is to traverse core memory and rid the host of emacs.” (See my followup post “Compiling Word War vi on Mac OS X”.)
• 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 - Bram Moolenaar on Google Video. (PDF of the presentation.)

Cuppa is a spiffy tea timer program for Mac (if only for its sound effects ;), itself inspired by The Tea Cooker from Linux. However, there’s an easy way to create a de facto tea timer, or run any kind of countdown, via the Terminal.

The sleep command allows you to run other commands or programs with a delay. So, for example, you could enter,

sleep 20; ps

which will pause for 20 seconds, then run ps to show your active tasks.

To keep you from having to stare at the Terminal window waiting for your tea countdown to finish, we’ll make use of the say command, which taps into your Mac’s built-in Text-to-Speech ability. (See System Preferences > Speech.)

So, assuming you want your Earl Grey to steep for four minutes, you could use something like this:

sleep 240; say "Your Tea, Earl Grey, Hot, has completed brewing."

Or for your Green Tea:

sleep 60; say "Green Tea processing complete."

Enjoy!