On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 12:32:19PM EST, Tim Chase wrote:
> >>- To change (once) to the dir of the current file
> >>
> >> :cd %:p:h
> >
[..]
>
> If you're impatient, full details can be found at
>
> :help filename-modifiers
>
> >2. How to use vim's help efficiently
>
> There are several attacks one can use to get Vim's help to spit
> out helpful stuff. In this case, I found it by typing
>
> :help :p
>
> and then hitting control+D instead of <enter> which causes Vim to
> show auto-completion for what you've typed so far. This brought
> back 6 columns of 11 rows each of possibilities,
Yes, I did that :-)
> but most of them
> were clearly not what I was looking for (there was something
> after the ":p"). The one that looked most promising was "::p"
> which, though somewhat strange-looking, turned out to be what I
> wanted.
Missed it .. and if I had seen it .. I probabably would have looked it
up just out of curiosity.
:-)
> Another attack might be to use
>
> :helpgrep :p
> :copen
.. and to think that I have this on my own little personal cheat sheet
and never really used it up to now. The nice thing is that you can then
use "/" to skim the output. Sometimes the difficulty is not so much
learning the rich vim feature-set but integrating it to your day-to-day
habits. Thank you so much for the reminder .. I feel guilty now so that
should help me do some :helpgrepping regularly from now on.
> This opens a quickfix window (":help quickfix-window") of all the
> hits in the help where ":p" appears in the help. While I get
> just shy of 400 hits back, there are some obviously good leads
> and some obviously bogus leads among the chaff. One of the nice
> things is that you can use regexps in your search, so you can
> change it to
>
> :helpgrep :p\>
.. even cooler than my uneducated method.
> to winnow that list down to 47 according to the help I have here.
> A number of the top hits come back in cmdline.txt, all fairly
> clustered together, so any of them would be a good starting
> candidate. Just navigate to a prospective candidate and hit
> <enter> to jump to that piece of the helpfile.
>
> These two methods are my usual attack into finding something in
> the vim-help. If these don't get you to where you want to go,
> it's often a matter of finding the right search keyword/pattern.
added to my cheat sheet .. which I try to write more as a
"task-oriented" document than a mere collection of commands.
I find the exercise useful since as, I believe, A. Einstein once
remarked .. if you can't explain it .. you don't fully understand it ..
or something to that effect.
> I've been stumped by this before (just this month) and the
> mailing list is quite friendly about answering questions as well
> as guiding you in with keywords. In my case it was finding what
> turned out to be ":help i_CTRL-G_u" and Yakov was able to dig it
> up in the help using the phrase "break undo" which I hadn't come
> up with.
>
> So dig a bit with the above tools, and if you hit a wall, drop a
> line on the list with what you want and what you've tried, and
> I'm sure you'll get all sorts of good answers back.
I often think that the intrinsic quality of vim@vim.org adds
considerable value to an already great piece of software. What I
particularly like about it is that you can come up with a naive or even
dumb question and within the hour, somebody will come up with the answer
to the question you should have asked.
I am subscribed to about 25 mailing lists at this point and the only one
that comes close is the TeX/LaTeX list. Interestingly enough there is
very little "trolling" on vim@vim.org .. as if the quality of the posts
acted as a deterrent.
Thanks
cga
