the ability to run text through any Unix utility (Vim and the shell)
If you know your Unix utilities (I often use awk inside of vim; it’s also great outside of it), your regular expressions, and these features, you can sculpt any text as you wish. What I mean is that you can take the output of pretty much anything, in a messed up format, and transform it into the content and format you want. This is supposed to be inspiring but I’m not sure how good a job I’m doing.
Also, if anyone’s interested, here are my current vim Anki cards. I use Anki for keyboard shortcuts which are supposed to be muscle memory, AMA
In my opinion, the 4 killer features of vim beyond moving around and basic editing are:
macros
the
scommand used with regular expressionsthe
gcommand (see e.g. Power of g)the ability to run text through any Unix utility (Vim and the shell)
If you know your Unix utilities (I often use
awkinside of vim; it’s also great outside of it), your regular expressions, and these features, you can sculpt any text as you wish. What I mean is that you can take the output of pretty much anything, in a messed up format, and transform it into the content and format you want. This is supposed to be inspiring but I’m not sure how good a job I’m doing.Also, if anyone’s interested, here are my current vim Anki cards. I use Anki for keyboard shortcuts which are supposed to be muscle memory, AMA