> What is your favorite little-known Vim feature?
One person's "little-known" feature is another person's
life-blood. :)
There are dark corners and abuses of Ex commands that I exercise
on a regular basis without thinking--when I mention them in an
answer on the list, I occasionally get a "wow, I didn't know that
about Vim" response.
Things like:
-using "*" to repeat the ex-range "'<,'>" so you don't have to
retype type 5 chars
:*s/foo/bar
is the same as
:'<,'>s/foo/bar
-doing complex things with ":g"/":v" commands and the ranges that
follow
-text objects. If you don't know 'em, learn 'em!
-dark corners of the regexp engine...especially back-references
if you've never used them before; and the power of the ":s"
command, along with the "\=" replacement for expression evaluation.
-the ability to sort a range/file by a found regexp rather than
just from the beginning of the line, or a fixed-column offset
Many of the "little-known" features are somewhat obvious upon
thinking about it, but it takes the little push of "Oh, I didn't
know you could combine X with Y and get such powerful behaviors!"
Vim's "{count}{operator}{motion}" syntax means that if you learn
a new {operator}, you can apply pretty much every {motion} you
know to that command. And vice-versa, if you learn a new
{motion}, suddenly you can start using it with all the
{operator}s that you already have.
Those are some of my top items. Many folks know them and use
them regularly, but they're definitely indicators of a "vim power
user".
To read up,
:help cpo-star
:help :g
:help :range
:help :sort
:help text-objects
:help sub-replace-special
:help motion.txt
:help operator
:help motion
-tim
