Abbreviations in Vim

There are a few bits of text that are common to almost every file I edit with Vim. One of them is, of course, my name. The others are my e-mail address, and the date.

Vim allows you to define simple text abbreviations to make entering such strings super-easy. Here's a snip of my .vimrc.

" Some handy abbreviations.
"
" Insert date.
iab xdate =strftime("%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S")

" What's my name?
iab xname Mohit Muthanna Cheppudira

" My personal sig.
iab xsigp Mohit Muthanna Cheppudira 

" My work sig.
iab xsigw Mohit Muthanna Cheppudira 

With the above in my Vim configuration, the text xdate gets auto-replaced to today's date.

Slick.

Simple Code Folding in Vim

I've been on a Vim customization frenzy the last few days, and I just discovered an uber-cool feature: code folding. Folding is the process of rolling up a block of lines in the buffer, to a single line.

Here's what folded code looks like:



So, to unfold a block, simply move the cursor to the block and hit "zO". (All the fold commands begin with "z"). Here's what an unfolded block looks like:


There are many ways to fold code, but the simplest way to enable it is by setting the foldmethod option to indent. This folds code based on its indentation.

If you're looking for syntax-aware folding, you can set fold-method to syntax. This generally takes a little more tweaking to get the right fold behaviour.

Add the following to your .vimrc, to get simple straightforward indentation-based code folding:

" Enable folding by indentation
" Use: zc, zo, zC, zO, zR, zM
" Ctrl-K .3 for ⋯
set foldmethod=indent
highlight Folded ctermfg=red
highlight FoldColumn ctermfg=white
set fillchars=fold:⋯

For more information about code folding, and to get a list of all the commands, see http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/usr_28.html.