Improving Vim Speed

Vim
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A grab-bag of tips to speed up your vimming! ctrlp command-t rails.vim surround.vim Ben's vim talk at Railsberry
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://thoughtbot.com/upcase/videos/improving-vim-speed
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Learning VIM is it helpful, harmful or irrelevant to use a GUI wrapper like Macvim or gVim?

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I bought VIM Adventures subscription. And I just keep playing the game over n over again. Very good decision in terms of pracitising vim.

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Anyone have best practice for installing vim on yosemite?

brew install vim, or copy ‘mvim’ from MacVim package contents, for example?

I’ve got a fresh install here and I want to make sure I get it right. My command-t stopped working after an upgrade.

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@Joe_Sak Most of my build tools broke when I upgraded to Yosemite beta this week. Command-T has a C-extension that has to get compiled locally, so I’d advocate uninstalling it (Command-T) and reinstalling it, but first make sure that you can build C extensions by installing a Homebrew formula or Ruby gem that requires an extension (something like Nokogiri).

I had to install Xcode Beta 6 and the related command line tools because Yosemite doesn’t work very well with the general release Xcode at the current time.

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For what it’s worth, here is the best way to get vim working

  • install latest xcode (currently 6.1 beta 2 for Yosemite)
  • use homebrew
  • make sure you’re on system ruby
  • brew install vim
  • follow command-t installation

Basically, vim and command-t must both be compiled on system ruby

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Glad you got it working. For users of rbenv whose shims are in use even for non-login shells, you may actually have to be sure that everything’s compiled in your non-system Ruby, but that’s very good to know that consistency is a factor in whether or not it works.

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I’ve got a few things I’ve found over the last few mos that have really helped me. One is renaming a file in vim with :Rename written by Gary Bernhardt which will rename the current file and rm the previous one:

function! RenameFile()
  let old_name = expand('%')
  let new_name = input('New file name: ', expand('%'))
  if new_name != '' && new_name != old_name
    exec ':saveas ' . new_name
    exec ':silent !rm ' . old_name
    redraw!
  endif
endfunction
map <leader>n :call RenameFile()<cr>

This one is just a pet peeve of mine but I hate seeing trailing white space so I use this:

" remove trailing white space
autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//e

I believe this one is in the Thoughtbot dot files but it’s made TDD really fast for me - that is changing to the last file you were in:

"move to last file
nnoremap <leader><leader> <c-^>
2 Likes
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@Anthony_Ross, Gary Bernhardt’s script is awesome, I used that for the last year. A couple weeks ago I simplified using vim-eunuch, whose :Move command functions in a similar way. Now I can move/rename a file with <leader>m like this:

nnoremap <Leader>m :Move <C-r>%

The <C-r>% inserts the current file name in the command line in much the same way that Gary’s script did. I think functionally these two approaches are really similar, but using vim-eunuch meant fewer lines in my personal config.

1 Like
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@benorenstein what font are you using in your terminal settings?

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Monaco 10 pt

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Thanks. I thought the font in the videos may have been a custom font. I ended up settling on consolas 13pt :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the tip on Hard mode, exactly what I need