I use Vim because it’s faster for me than other text editors. Sure, you could use vim-mode for Atom or one of the various packages for Sublime, but they all have shortcomings — and Vim works everywhere. Here are five things I do to make Vim faster for me.

Relative Line Numbers

Most people know that you can use numbers with Vim commands to make a change multiple times, across multiple lines, or multiple characters. That’s not super useful if you have to stop to count the number of lines in a block of code before deleting it, for example. I use relative line numbers in Vim. The current line is always 0. I can instantly see that a block of code is 14 lines long and d14d to delete it.

https://gist.github.com/joshbetz/271f612479de27f6d958

Use . to repeat the last command

This one is pretty self explanatory. Any command can be repeated with .. If you delete a line with dd and realize that you also want to delete a few more lines, pressing . three times will delete the next three lines. It may seem like a small thing, but that’s half as many keystrokes.

Use = to format code

Often, when you copy and paste code from somewhere else, it won’t be formatted properly. The = command can help here. You can either do something like gg=G to format the entire document or highlight the block of code that needs to be formatted (in visual mode) and press = to format just that block.

Make shifts keep selection

When you highlight a block of code for the purpose of indenting it, the selection is lost when you do the first shift. Often times, you need to shift it more than one position though. The following snippet keeps the current selection in visual mode after you perform a shift.

https://gist.github.com/joshbetz/7f9fca420fae26d04794

Search to find what you’re looking for

I think one of the reasons I’m slower in other text editors is that I use the mouse to browse for specific code instead of using the search function. Start searching with /. After you enter the search and press return, you can jump the next and previous matches with n and N respectively.

Occasionally I need to send sensitive files to someone on the internet. I took a tip I once heard from Merlin Mann and built a script to automate this as much as possible. It requires Hazel and a cloud sharing service that syncs to your Mac. I’m using Dropbox.

The basic idea is to use Dropbox as a place to share files safely and automate the process with Hazel. We’re going to rely on long, obscure filenames along with randomly generated passwords and short availability windows to protoct our files. We can automate all of this through a couple Hazel commands and an Applescript.

The Hazel commands are set up as follows. The first one looks for any file or folder older than 7 days that is a zip archive and deletes it. This enforces our short availability window. You could make the window anything you like. The second command looks for anything that’s not a zip archive and runs the following Applescript on it.

https://gist.github.com/4686756

We generate a random password with openssl rand -base64 32 — this means we’ll get 32 random base64 characters. We also create a SHA1 hash of the file to append to the filename. After that, just zip the file with the random password and put the password on the clipboard. You can do more, like generating a notification when the script is done. I have a TextExander snippet that lets you fill in the filename and grabs the password off the clipboard.

Ideally, you wouldn’t send the password along with the link to document. Try to use two different methods to notify someone where the file is located and what the password is — even if it’s just two different email accounts on a separate server.

For now this won’t work with directories because the SHA1 hash of a directory is blank. An easy way to fix that would be to zip the directory first and then get the hash and rename the zip file.