Vim on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

How Vim Can Make a Hacker’s Life Easier with Macros and Registers

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0530

How Vim Can Make a Hacker’s Life Easier with Macros and Registers

Why Every Hacker Should Master Vim Macros and Registers

If you’re deep into hacking, pentesting, or security research, you know that automation is key. Repetitive tasks like manipulating payloads, encoding/decoding strings, or tweaking shell scripts can become tedious. Enter Vim macros and registers! These powerful features let you record and replay keystrokes, making your workflow insanely efficient.

No that I dont use IDE’s the likes of Visual Studio code (sometimes I do). However they can never match the raw power of vi/vim/nvim or any of the vim family of editors. To reap the maximum benefit, you have to learn the basics of using the editor in normal mode ( which is by the not the editing mode).

ncurses based eFTE editor – programmers lightweight editor

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:15:49 +0000

nefte is a lightweight programmers editor. Here is descriptioin:

Description : eFTE is an advanced programmers editor with goals of being lightweight, yet
            : totally configurable. Support for user defined programming languages, menu
            : systems and key bindings are provided with many common defaults already
            : defined. eFTE is still a new project, however, we extend from the FTE editor
            : which was first released in 1995, so eFTE is tried and true with many features
            : for the programmer/text editor.
            : 
            : This package contains nefte, the ncurses version of the editor.

And to install:

vim mappings – easy way to do things.

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 01:15:40 +0000

You can use vim mappings to make some of your editor tasks very simple. Here I am giving you just a example, but you could always let your imagination run wild.

:nmap ,b Oj0c$**hP

And what do we do here.

O – Add a new line

– Go to normal mode

j – go to newly added line

0 – Go to begining of line

c$ – Change till end of line

vim – yank/xopy in different register to paste

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 01:21:17 +0000

Very quick update, to use registers, you can select and then yank in a register to paste using the same register. This could be a convinient way to copy multiple selections and then paste which ever selection you want. Here is the simple way to do it:

visuallly select with v/V

then “qy to yank (here we are yanking into register q, so in the command you can use any of a-z to use as register)

Check all vim colorschemes for minor issues

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 01:13:25 +0000

Here is script that checks all the colorschemes in the current directory and corrects them if possible (Processing of the file is done with simple commands like sed, grep)

Checks that the color_name is same as Filename

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: check_colors.sh
#
#         USAGE: ./check_colors.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:
#
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), 
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================
cd ~/.vim/colors
for i in *vim
do
    #echo "Processing $i"
    if [[ $(grep -c g:colors_name $i ) -eq 0 ]]; then
        if [[ $(grep -c colors_name $i ) -eq 0 ]]; then
            echo "File $i does not have colorname";
            missing=$missing" $i"
        else
            sed -i.bak '/colors_name/ s/.*/let g:colors_name="'${i//.vim}'"/g' $i
        fi
    else
        if [[ $(grep -c colors_name $i|grep let ) -gt 1 ]]; then
            echo "WARN ----->> File $i has more than one colorsname"
        fi
        colorname=$(grep g:colors_name $i|grep let| sed -e 's/"//g' -e 's/.*=//' |tr -d ' ')
        if [[ ${colorname}.vim != $i ]]; then
            echo "Filename $i does not match colorname $colorname .. correcting "
            sed -i.bak '/colors_name/ s/.*/let g:colors_name="'${i//.vim}'"/g' $i
            #sed -i.bak 's/(.*g:colors_name.*=)/1'${i//.vim}'/g' $i
        fi
    fi
done

if [[ x$missing != x ]] ; then
    echo "Missing colornames in $missing"
fi

vim maps – simple commands to do stuff.

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:03:42 +0000

Some time back, I was working on some script for logging and I wanted to change the class to function like this:

$logger->Debug("Test string");
loggerFunc("Debug", "Test String");

As you can see, this change could be quite frustrating if you have quite a few references. And thus vim comes to rescue.

Simple map like ::

:map ,mm :s/(.*)$logger->(.*)((.*)).*/1loggerFunc("2",3);/

and then I can do “/$logger->” and then “n” to go to next match. Just do “,mm” and the line is re-factored.

Vim – Why and where am I getting these errors from?

Wed, 15 May 2013 01:47:13 +0000

If you have got this question in your mind, then you are in right place.

vim -V20  2>&1 |tee

You can give the debugfile as any file, where you would want to log the debug messages. This will log a lot of information in the debugfile, you can open the file, once you have got the error in the main vim window. After this, you can open the debugfile and simply search for the error that you were getting. Just look for the reason why this error is originated in the debug logs and then it should be pretty simple to fix that.

vim mappings for multiple files.

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 06:34:23 +0000

If you open multiple files in vim with command line option. Then the only way to move between the files is “:n” and “:N”. There is a easier way to do this. Just add mappings for this in vimrc. Here is what you can use.

map  :N
map  :n

And if you want to make sure that you move to the prev or next file after saving the file, then you modifyt the mapping like this:

cream bash ide – vim with bash support

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:16:48 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Here you can find the cream editor. This is basically vim editor with lots of customizations thus making it simpler for the users to use the editor directly.

This version already has the bash and perl support plugins and thus you can start using them as IDE without the need to add any plugins. It has a simple and advanced mode. In the simple mode you need not worry about all the modes of the vi/vim editor. How cool is that 🙂

Get yourself som new themes for vim

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:18:53 +0000

Well, you would already have some themes for your vim, by default. And if you did not like them then you would have added some of your own too (downloaded from vim.org). But, those are something, that you might not still like and want to make some changes.

Here’s, a new way to do it. Just go to the link mentioned below and click on Generate Dark or Generate Light. You can generate as many as you like and once you like the theme, simply click on vim in the bottom and download 🙂 BTW, you can generate textmate and Emacs theme as well.

g flag in :s useless in vim

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 07:33:19 +0000

Some time back there was a post on vim_use list about the “/g” flag for the search and replace functionality of the vim. And the response of “Tim Chase” on the same was very elaborate and interesting. I always knew that “/g” is only for replacing multiple occurrences on the same line, but here are few things that I did not know.

   :0/this/s//that

This one will only replace the first occurrence of this in the whole file.

debug call function() to debug a function in vim

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 06:04:53 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever wished that you could either see what is going on initially at the vim startup like you could do with C program in the gdm mode, but really did not want to go through gdb. Or rather you sometime felt that some function defined by some plugin is causing some issue and you wanted to debug just that function. Well you need not wish anymore, the functionality is already there.

vim autocomplete – automagically without tab.

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 01:10:59 +0000

Lets first do the setup in one line. Get my vim script downloader.

Use the script to add the script with script ID : :1879 (vim-autocomplpop) to your list of plugins for vim and you are done.

If you are using snipmate, then make sure that you read the description of the plugin to add the required lines to the vimrc file to get the full functionality. You would love to type henceforth in your favourite editor. We will talk about more on Intellisense in few days time.. Chao till then.

what is vim in 6Kb..

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:36:33 +0000

If you thought that vim is very bloated and nothing abuot this editor can be small, then you are not alone. I was myself in the same bandwagon.

Well, I never thought that there could be anything about vim that can be explained in Kb’s, lest alone the complete vim features. But looks like vim.org had thought about this and thus came up with this. And here is the direct link to the vim in 6kb in English.

All in one solution for all the scripts of vim from vim.org

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:39:52 +0000

For quite sometime now, I was looking for some console based program which would help me get the scripts from vim.org. A simple solution would have been to do a wget for the scripts. But since there are so many scripts coming up daily and with a need to search based on script ID and name of the script, I thought better to write a script that can do all of those things. Now, what was required was that the script should be either able to download this or add to the GLVS script. Also note that, I had done something similar in the past here. There are some additions in the below script. You can download a copy of the script get_vim_scripts. Or you can copy the script from below:

shopt causes bash completion to stop working.

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 02:35:15 +0000

Couple of days, I added some scripts to my bash startup and suddenly realized that bash completions stopped working. This is tricky situation in bash to figure out what went wrong. So, I set my foot down to make sure that I find out the culprit. Thus I started with method of elimination. So, I started with nothing in .bashrc and kept adding my stuff in batches, until the said feature was broken. Once that happened I started removing the added ones, one by one, until my completion started working again.

[Solved] Abbreviations not working in vim

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:17:39 +0000

Today I found that abbreviations are not working in vim in my current login. I searched log of blog’s and sill did not find any solution so I decided to take the matters in my hand.

To start with I disabled all the plugin’s by moving my plugin directory. This did not help me solve the issue, so the only other option left was to now disable the vimrc file completely. Once I removed the vimrc file, the abbreviations started working.

when you press f9 'paste' is on , press f9 again and 'paste' is off, and so forth (works in insert-mode and command-mode)

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:20:07 +0000

<a class="zem_slink" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim’s pastetoggle: when you press f9 ’paste’ is on , press f9 again and ’paste’ is off, and so forth (works in <a class="zem_slink" title="Insert key" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_key">insert-mode and command-mode) $ nmap :set paste!:set paste? Sets as paste toggle, with visual confirmation of state

* View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites * View all commands by Vilemirth

commandlinefu.com

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Play with vim colors.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:16:52 +0000

In vim you can customize the colors of your terminal vim or the GUI version. If you wanted to play around with colors then you can simply put the file containing the colorscheme to directory ”~/.vim/colors” and load it in vim with ”colorscheme ”.

That most of you would know. What I will add here is how easy it can be create it if you knew the right place to do it: Head over<a href="http://yukihiro.nakadaira.googlepages.com/vim-color.html" target="_blank"> here. No explanations needed. Anyway if you need help, leave a comment.

jumps and marks in vim

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:59:25 +0000

First we will talk about jumps in vim. Very useful for <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/navigation" title="Navigation" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigation">navigation and jumping around the vim. The jumps are commands that lets you jump from one location to another location, like {{ or [[ and so on … From the help file of vim

A ”jump” is one of the following commands: ”’”, ”`”, ”G”, ”/”, ”?”, ”n”,
”N”, ”%”, ”(”, ”)”, ”[[”, ”]]”, ”{”, ”}”, ”:s”, ”:tag”, ”L”, ”M”, ”H” and
the commands that start editing a new file. If you make the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/cursor" title="Cursor (computers)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_%28computers%29">cursor ”jump”
with one of these commands, the position of the cursor before the jump is
remembered. You can return to that position with the ”’’” and ”“” command,
unless the line containing that position was changed or deleted.

bash script to change the vim colorscheme from the list of locally available schemes

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:35 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Today I was just wondering how good it would be to have a script to change the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim colorscheme from the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/cmd_exe" title="Command Prompt" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Prompt">command prompt. The plan for the script was simply to print the list of available schemes and then let the user select the actions from there on. So, here is the result:

vi tips with examples for programmers — very useful

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:08:37 +0000

First off, sorry for not posting regularly. Will be so for probably another couple of days.

In the meantime found a very nice artcle on vim:

<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_editor/Vim/Useful_things_for_programmers_to_know" target="_blank">http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_editor/Vim/Useful_things_for_programmers_to_know

vim – get the list of all the scripts available.

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:26:35 +0000

To get a list of all the scripts in the vim.sf.net project, you can run the following command. This will list all the scripts with the script id.

wget -O – ’http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?&show_me=4000&result_ptr=0’ -o /dev/null | <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/grep" title="Grep" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep">grep width| grep script_id= |<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/sed" title="Sed" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed">sed ’s/.*script_id=//’|tr -d ”””|tr ”>” ” ”|sed ’s/< .*//’ | tr -d ’\001’-’\011’’\013’’\014’’\016’-’\037’’\200’-’\377’ |sort -n<h6 class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com/2009/09/17/use-curl-to-monitor-your-vonage-phone-bill/">Use curl to Monitor Your Vonage Phone Bill (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://securewebs.com/yum-updates/">Yum Updates (securewebs.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2009/10/10/ubuntudebian-quick-reference-how-to-change-your-servers-utc-timezone-on-the-command-line/">Ubuntu/Debian Quick Reference: How To Change Your Server’s UTC Timezone on the command line (gubatron.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/11/22/short-information-about-loaded-kernel-modules/">Short Information about loaded kernel modules (amit-agarwal.co.in) <div class="zemanta-pixie"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/b22b2e85-8107-4f9b-9130-85a8e8ae370b/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_b52.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related more-info pretty-attribution paragraph-reblog">

Craeating a sequence in OpenOffice.org calc.

Thu, 06 May 2010 13:31:19 +0000

Creating a numberd list in the calc with alphabets can be really tiresome sometimes. I found a simple solution to this. Create the numbered list in vim and then paste it into Openoffice.org calc. Here’s how I do it:

Open vim

type the first in sequence (ex Amit_aga_001)

Follow the below sequence to create a macro:

Esc

[Atl]+q+(any alphabet say ’a’) — this will start recording the macro

yy – yank the current line

change the window in split screen.

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:12:00 +0000

I use the split screen in vim very in-frequently, so I did not really know how to move from one screen to the other. There is also very little or no documentation that I found on this on the first page of google, so here it is :
press ”ctrl+w and ctrl + w” to change to other window.

If you are not sure how to get the split screen, then you can type help split in vim to get the help on split screen.

bash script to change vim colorscheme based on the available themes

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:41 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Here’s one script that you may find useful. A little variation or wrapper for this script can make your life colorful 🙂

You can write a wrapper to this to take one of the inputs randomly and then use it in alias to start <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim.

vim understanding the various modes and using the yanking more efficiently.

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:42:38 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

We will look at the vim modes today. Sometime back , I was looking at copying a function body. So I was basically looking to copy the lines till matching ”}”. I found a plugin called <a href="http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1234" target="_blank">yankring which would allow me to yank the text in various combinations. So I can copy a function by going to the begining of the function and then ”y}”. That is very simple to understand right? Wrong!!!

vim scripts and tips

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:01:07 +0000

Here are few of the links for vim that you can use. It consists of the link to vimrc, colorscheme, syntaxcomplete and zzsplash.
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/vimrc">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/vimrc
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/almost-default.vim">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/almost-default.vim
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/syntaxcomplete.vim">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/syntaxcomplete.vim
<a href="http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/zzsplash.vim">http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/User:Tonymec/zzsplash.vim<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"> <h6 class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2010/02/02/bash-script-to-change-the-vim-colorscheme-from-the-list-of-locally-available-schemes/">bash script to change the vim colorscheme from the list of locally available schemes (amit-agarwal.co.in) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3740684.htm">Wikia Introduces New Tools For People to Create Wiki Answer Sites on Any Topic (prweb.com) <div class="zemanta-pixie"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/a04b9f08-df03-476c-b6d3-a1d32078cb64/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_b68.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related more-info pretty-attribution paragraph-reblog">

eclim for Fedora – Leonidas – installation.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:48:31 +0000

Here is the installation instruction for Eclim for vim. I have not tried it as I did not require it, but if you need it.

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/eclim/eclim/1.4.8/eclim_1.4.8.tar.gz?use_mirror=biznetnetworks

sudo ant -Declipse.home=/usr/lib/eclipse -Dvim.files=/home/amitag/.vim -Dplugins=cdt

create ctgs using

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Built-in lists in vim

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:49:32 +0000

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vimscript" title="Vimscript" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimscript">Vimscript provides excellent support for operating on collections of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/data" title="Data" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data">data, a cornerstone of programming. In this third article in the series, learn how to use Vimscript’s built-in lists to ease everyday operations such as reformatting lists, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers. You’ll also walk through examples that demonstrate the power of lists to extend and enhance two common uses of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">Vim: creating a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/user_defined_function" title="User-defined function" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-defined_function">user-defined function to align assignment operators, and improving the built-in text completions mechanism.

using cscope with vim

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:02:50 +0000

: Image by schoschie via Flickr

Here’s the best of the two links that I found with <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/google" title="Google" rel="homepage" href="http://google.com">Google and <a class="zem_slink" title="Bing" rel="homepage" href="http://bing.com/">Bing combined out of lots of links that I think can help you understand how to use cscope with vim, if you dont know already.

<a href="http://cscope.sourceforge.net/cscope_vim_tutorial.html">http://cscope.sourceforge.net/cscope_vim_tutorial.html
<a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/ldev/0130091154_242.htm">http://www.faqs.org/docs/ldev/0130091154_242.htm

7 Examples for Sed Hold and Pattern Buffer Operations

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:58:50 +0000

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/35237104750@N01/259102613"><img id="kwiclick-temp-0" title="txt e-book" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/259102613_bd9628c791_m.jpg" alt="txt e-book" />

Know when you will type :q in your term instead of vi(m), the alias will chewed you out.

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:53:47 +0000

most simple solution is to alias :q like so:
alias :q=`echo ”This is not vim”`

but as someone suggested in commandlinefu, you can use tput to put some color and fun into this.
alias :q=’tput setaf 1; echo >&2 ”this is NOT vi(m) :/”; tput sgr0’

Multiple search in vim

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:02:19 +0000

I was looking at a log file and needed to highlight multiple search items to make the logs more readable. I got into multiple threads suggesting various cryptic vim commands but I was in no mood to remember them. So, I finally hit <a href="http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=479" target="_blank">this.

This is a cool vim script which you can use to highlight multiple search patter. You can simply add a search term by doing

stop indentation on current file in vim to keep the indentation from copied text.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:57:24 +0000

I have been looking for this for quite some time. Finally found two easy ways to do it:

:setlocal noautoindent
:setlocal nocindent
:setlocal nosmartindent
:setlocal indentexpr=

Just use the above four commands when the file is already open to stop all the indentation/smart indentation/auto indentation in vim for the current file. If you want to map it then you can use shorthand notations and map it in the .vimrc file.