Hacking Vim 7.2 Review

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Hacking Vim 7.2 ReviewThe intended audience
In the preface of the book it is stated that the intended audience of the book is intermediate to experienced Vim users and considering the subtitle "Ready-to-use hacks with solutions for common situations encountered by users of the Vim editor" I was lead to believe is a book for those that had been around block and need hands-on examples of production boosters. In my mind I expected it to be a kind of cookbook with small recipes for distinct problems. This is most likely because I have just read the excellent "PHP phrasebook" by Christian Wenz and "Python Phrasebook" by Brad Dayley which both does a great job in this genre of ready-to-use books oriented to more experienced users. The reason I find these books so great are that they acknowledge that the reader is intermediate to experienced and heads straight for the recipes leaving the basics behind. After having read "Having Vim 7.2' I am not as convinced that "Hacking Vim 7.2' succeeded as well in this genre as it dwells too much at the basics in my opinion, but I will return to this later.
A short review of the chapters
The first chapter starts of with a historical insight to Vim and while this can be interesting it seems a bit out of focus for this "ready-to-use hacks with solutions" book. I did not really feel very exited after having read this chapter, but luckily this was followed by the excellent second chapter "Personalizing Vim". This second chapter dives head first into actual Vim hacking with a bunch of well described small hacks to the standard setup including color highlighting, gvim menu hacking and font changing. This chapter definitely fulfilled my expectation to what this a book like this should be, despite the fact that it dealt a little more with the graphical gvim than I am interested in.
The third chapter is called "Better navigation" and while it contained some useful bits, it also went unnecessary details with very basic elements already covered by vimtutor, which I assume that all "intermediate to experienced" users would be familiar with. This is quite vivid in example 1: "Finding the next occurrences of a word" where a full page is used on describing the standard search function. The chapter does however cover most subjects to be expected in a navigation chapter, so for the users who are completely new to Vim navigation it is a good introduction, but it reminds more of a introductory textbook than a "ready-to-use- hacks" book.
Chapter four: "Production boosters" was the chapter I had been looking the most forward to reading after having seen the table of contents. The chapter contains a number of hacks that I found quite useful, such as a excellent walk through example of the usage of omnicompletion: The author goes into details with a real life scenario and uses a function written in vim to accomplish the text editing and I learn alot from reading it. Another example is the coverage of the netrw feature in Vim which enables editing files directly over ssh or ftp. Personally this is how I prefer a book like this to be - inspiring me to try out new hacks own my own.
The fifth chapter goes through formatting of both code and text in various ways and although it had some useful tips there wasn't really something I was very exited about. The sixth chapter about basic vim scripting was really surprisingly basic. The chapter is a very basic introduction to scripting and anyone with a background in any programming language would for instance not find the sections on "for loops" or "while loops" terrible interesting. At this point in the book I again got a bit confused about the intended audience: On one hand this is a great slow introduction to scripting and general programming, but when considering the subtitle of the book I would have expected a more direct approach with examples of useful scripts and tips to hack these.
The final and seventh chapter extends the scripting basics with what I believe was a more appropriate level for the claimed level of the reader. Here good practices and debugging of scripts is described, as wells as short descriptions on how to script in external languages such python, perl and ruby.
In line with the style of the first chapter appendix A does not really cover any ready-to-use hacks, but is instead more a list of what I would call fun-facts. I did not know that you could play Nibbles, Sokoban or Tetris inside Vim, but on the other hand I didn't really care either. The most interesting section in this appendix covered using Vim as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), but most of the tips were quite shallow as they deferred actual usage instructions to online sources and scripts. The final appendix called "Vim configuration alternatives" is quite good, but should perhaps have been included in the second chapter as it is quite short, but very relevant.
The layout
My overall impression is that the layout leaves some room for improvement. Often examples start in the middle of the text and there is no typographical indicators showing that a example is starting. This makes the book hard to use as a reference, since I often look for the examples when I need implement a hack. Furthermore, there is a number of small tips boxes spread out through the book, but they do not have titles and this makes it more tedious to find that special box with the good tip without reading through them all. Finally the book is available both in a ebook and a printed version, but the printed book is in black and white, which makes the color screenshots on page 142 and the syntax highlighted script on page 193 a bit hard to comprehend.
Final verdict
As the reader might have figured by now I am not completely thrilled about this book. I think it at times misses the intended audience and prioritize some less important element of Vim on behalf of more ready-to-use hacks. I would have loved if the pages spent on games within Vim was instead used on covering Vim as an IDE in detail or perhaps skipping the very basic scripting elements in chapter six in favor of a section on the LaTeX-suite for Vim. In summary: I could have imagined this book be more concise, but I do appreciate the good chapters as "4. Production boosters" or "2. Personalizing Vim" - both have undoubtedly made me a better Vim user.Hacking Vim 7.2 OverviewThis book is a tutorial packed with ready-to-use hacks that give solutions for common problems faced by Vim users in their everyday life. Every chapter covers a set of recipes, each of which follows a systematic approach with a self-contained description of the task it covers, how to use it, and what you gain by using it. The minimum version of Vim required for each hack is clearly indicated. If you are a Vim user who wants to get more out of this legendary text editor, this book is for you. It focuses on making life easier for intermediate to experienced Vim users.

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Learning the vi and Vim Editors Review

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Learning the vi and Vim Editors Reviewvi, like many of the utilities developed during the early years of Unix, has a reputation for being hard to navigate. Bram Moolenaar's enhanced clone, Vim ("vi Improved"), has gone a long way toward removing reasons for such impressions. Vim includes many conveniences, visual guides, and help screens. It has become possibly the most popular version of vi, so this seventh edition of this book devotes seven new chapters to it in Part 2. However, many other worthy clones of vi also exist and they are covered in part 3.
The first two chapters present some simple vi commands with which you can get started. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on easier ways to do tasks. Chapters 5 through 7 provide tools that help you shift more of the editing burden to the computer. They introduce you to the ex line editor underlying vi, and they show you how to issue ex commands from within vi.
Chapter 8, provides an introduction to the extensions available in the four vi clones covered in this book. It centralizes in one place the descriptions of multiwindow editing, GUI interfaces, extended regular expressions, facilities that make editing easier, and several other features, providing a roadmap to what follows in the rest of this book. It also provides a pointer to source code for the original vi, which can be compiled easily on modern Unix systems, including Linux.
Part 2 describes Vim, the most popular vi clone. Chapter 9, provides a general introduction to Vim, including where to get binary versions for popular operating systems and some of the different ways to use Vim. Chapter 10 describes the major improvements in Vim, such as built-in help, control over initialization, additional motion commands, and extended regular expressions. Chapter 11, focuses on multiwindow editing, which is perhaps the most significant additional feature over standard vi. This chapter provides all the details on creating and using multiple windows.
Chapter 12, looks into the Vim command language, which lets you write scripts to customize and tailor Vim to suit your needs. Much of Vim's ease of use comes from the large number of scripts that other users have already written and contributed to the Vim distribution. Chapter 13 looks at Vim in modern GUI environments. Chapter 14 focuses on Vim's use as a programmer's editor, above and beyond its facilities for general text editing. Of particular value are the folding and outlining facilities, smart indenting, syntax highlighting, and edit-compile-debug cycle speedups. Chapter 15, is a bit of a catch-all chapter, covering a number of interesting points that don't fit into the earlier chapters.
Part 3 describes three other popular vi clones: nvi, elvis, and vile. Chapters 16 through 18 cover these clones and show you how to use them, discussing the features that are specific to each one.
Part 4 provides useful reference material. Appendix A lists all vi and ex commands, sorted by function. It also provides an alphabetical list of ex commands. Selected vi and ex commands from Vim are also included. Appendix B lists set command options for vi and for all four clones. Appendix C consolidates checklists found earlier in the book. Appendix D describes vi's place in the larger Unix and Internet culture.
vi and its clones may seem like backwards tools in the 21st century, but at a very low level of operation, it may be all you have. It is good to understand it or at least have a reference where you can get up to speed quickly if you need to do so. You may say this is only something system admins need to know, but at one time or another we all turn into system administrators at some level. Also, vi is one of the few editing tools you can count on to be on every Unix system. You cannot say the same of dtpad (most commonly on Sun workstations) or nedit (common on SGI and Sun workstations). Sometimes you have to trade ubiquity for intuitiveness, and in the case of Unix editors, this is one of those times.Learning the vi and Vim Editors Overview
There's nothing that hard-core Unix and Linux users are more fanatical about than their text editor. Editors are the subject of adoration and worship, or of scorn and ridicule, depending upon whether the topic of discussion is your editor or someone else's.vi has been the standard editor for close to 30 years. Popular on Unix and Linux, it has a growing following on Windows systems, too. Most experienced system administrators cite vi as their tool of choice. And since 1986, this book has been the guide for vi. However, Unix systems are not what they were 30 years ago, and neither is this book. While retaining all the valuable features of previous editions, the 7th edition of Learning the vi and vim Editors has been expanded to include detailed information on vim, the leading vi clone. vim is the default version of vi on most Linux systems and on Mac OS X, and is available for many other operating systems too. With this guide, you learn text editing basics and advanced tools for both editors, such as multi-window editing, how to write both interactive macros and scripts to extend the editor, and power tools for programmers -- all in the easy-to-follow style that has made this book a classic.Learning the vi and vim Editors includes:A complete introduction to text editing with vi:
How to move around vi in a hurry Beyond the basics, such as using buffers vi's global search and replacement Advanced editing, including customizing vi and executing Unix commandsHow to make full use of vim: Extended text objects and more powerful regular expressions Multi-window editing and powerful vim scripts How to make full use of the GUI version of vim, called gvim vim's enhancements for programmers, such as syntax highlighting, folding and extended tags Coverage of three other popular vi clones -- nvi, elvis, and vile -- is also included. You'll find several valuable appendixes, including an alphabetical quick reference to both vi and ex mode commands for regular vi and for vim, plus an updated appendix on vi and the Internet. Learning either vi or vim is required knowledge if you use Linux or Unix, and in either case, reading this book is essential.After reading this book, the choice of editor will be obvious for you too.

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