Vim 7.0 also adds another marvelous feature to this star-studded editor, Tab Browsing

To open a tab, just use the following command

tabe filename

This shall open a new tab.

To move between tabs you can use tabNext and tabPrevious. Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown work as well in the X version as well as on gnome-terminal.

tabclose shall do the needful as the command states.

Vim 7.0 was lauched sometime back, but I wasn’t able to check it, But its awesome. The Autocomplete or intellisense built is just too good. It supports various filetypes, it will complete the function as well as show a preview of what arguments are expected out of it.

First check if you have Vim 7 installed and in the VIM directory if you have a folder called autoload. If you have check if it contains *complete.vim files. If everything is Good… lets move…

Lets add PHP autocomplete feature. In your $HOME/.vimrc file add the following command

autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP

Once done, Open any PHP file and within the <?php tag, write mysql_c and press Ctrl-x Ctrl-o , and here is what happens

You can see a Full list of functions begining with mysql_c

The .vimrc command that we added supports intellisense like autocomplete only for PHP filetypes, note FileType php in the statement. If you want to add support for the other languages as well

• Open the autoload/<filetype>complete.vim file
• Check for intial lines like …
  function! htmlcomplete#CompleteTags(findstart, base)
if a:findstart
• Now, I had opened htmlcomplete.vim file, Now to add support for html files…
  • Add the following command
    autocmd FileType html set omnifunc=htmlcomplete#CompleteTags

Thats it ! add more support the way you want…

Not all must have used this feature of Vim, You can use Vim’s file browsing feature, to select and open a file all you need to do is know a “vsp” command.

To the “vsp” or the Vertical Split command give argument as “.”, a period. Which will prompt Vim to open left bar that will list all directories and files, directories first, just like any directory listing command of your OS.

You can traverse the directories by pressing “Enter” to change to that directory, and you can go on browsing.

If you want to open a file, Press “o” when the cursor is under that file. That will open the file in the same window as the Browser window.

If you want to open the file in the previously visited window, press “O” (Captial alphabet O). This will open the file in the previous window.

Now you know how to use Vim as your favourite GUI Editor

Most of you programming freaks, like the Auto Complete idea of an IDE (using Ctrl+Space) to complete the word. And all the GUI IDE lovers think Vi is just another “Notepad”.

Beware, VIM is noway behind the IDEs, It too supports your Auto-Complete.
Ctrl+P (match previous tokens) or Ctrl+N (match tokens ahead/next) is an alternative to Ctrl+Space

Consider you have following file contents.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /somefilepath1/.*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /somefilepath2/.*

Now if you want to add another RewriteCond, and you have reached till “Rewri”

All you have to do is press Ctrl+P, Vim will automatically add “teCond” to the string “Rewri”

Many a times you want to compare two different files… Unless you have a good utility… you cant. But for Vim as its a wonderful tool, get a good visual difference.

Let us consider you have two files js1.js and js2.js

js1.js

javascript:
var selection;
var s;
if (window.getSelection)
{
selection = window.getSelection();
} else if (document.getSelection)
{
selection = document.getSelection();
}
if (selection.toString().length > 0)
{
s = selection.toString();
} else {
s = prompt("Search", "Martina Hingis");
}
if (s.length > 0)
{
window.location = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"+s;
}

js2.js

javascript:
var selectionR;
var s;
if (window.getselectionR)
{
selectionR = window.getselectionR();
}
if (selectionR.toString().length > 0)
{
s = selectionR.toString();
} else {
s = prompt("Search", "Martina Hingis");
}
if (s.length > 0)
{
window.location = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"+s;
}

Now we've got to compare these two files..

• Open any file say js1.js in vi
• Use the following command to split the difference
  vert diffsplit js2.js
• The command vert (or can be vertical) will tell that the differential split of js2.js with the current file i.e. js1.js is to be shown vertically.

Lovely isn't it.

If you ever wonder how would you get your messy XML and HTML well-formatted, Here is the whizard, Tidy tidy is a small but very effective tool written by Dave Raggett.

Tidy can clean, indent XML and HTML data very effectively.

tidy -mi -xml file-name

Download the tool, and place the tool in your PATH, so that it can be directly used. Then you can use the tool very effectively.

If you see the screenshot of my vim editor, you'll see we can use Vi's shell command and tidy to modify the file and indent it

The parameters that you see are

• m modify the file
• i indent the file
• xml the input file is XML file

You can exclude the xml parameter if you want to tidy a XHTML or HTML file.

This is not the only thing that Tidy can do, but it will find out errors and warnings in your HTML or XML page.

Thanks! Tidy