Vim Splits - Move Faster and More Naturally

Most of us are Vim users and have tweaked our favorite editor for speed and convenience. See thoughtbot’s dotfiles.

One of my favorite tools is the window split. Here is a quick splits overview and configurations to use them more effectively.

The basics

Create a vertical split using :vsp and horizontal with :sp.

By default, they duplicate the current buffer. This command also takes a filename:

:vsp ~/.vimrc

You can specify the new split height by prefixing with a number:

:10sp ~/.zshrc

Close the split like you would close vim:

:q

Easier split navigations

We can use different key mappings for easy navigation between splits to save a keystroke. So instead of ctrl-w then j, it’s just ctrl-j:

nnoremap <C-J> <C-W><C-J>
nnoremap <C-K> <C-W><C-K>
nnoremap <C-L> <C-W><C-L>
nnoremap <C-H> <C-W><C-H>

More natural split opening

Open new split panes to right and bottom, which feels more natural than Vim’s default:

set splitbelow
set splitright

Resizing splits

Vim’s defaults are useful for changing split shapes:

"Max out the height of the current split
ctrl + w _

"Max out the width of the current split
ctrl + w |

"Normalize all split sizes, which is very handy when resizing terminal
ctrl + w =

More split manipulation

"Swap top/bottom or left/right split
Ctrl+W R

"Break out current window into a new tabview
Ctrl+W T

"Close every window in the current tabview but the current one
Ctrl+W o

:help!

As with everything in Vim, for more information, check the well-written helpfiles. In Vim, :help splits.

Vim Meetups

Come talk splits at a Vim Enthusiast Meetup near you:

• Stockholm Vim Meetup
• Boston Vim Meetup
• San Francisco’s VimSF Google Group

Photo credit: Andrew Ressa on Flickr

Written by Adarsh Pandit.

Online presentation with thoughtbot and Heroku

Adarsh, Alex, and I are giving a free online presentation with Abe from Heroku about how their platform fits into our process. Over 1,400 people have registered so far! The details:

• Tomorrow, April 17
• Once at 7:00am PST (2:00pm GMT / 7:30pm IST)
• A second time at 10:00am PST (5:00pm GMT / 10:30pm IST)

RSVP here.

We will be live coding(!), making a single change to a live web application hosted on Heroku within the context of a common process for us:

• Campfire for real-time communication and alerts.
• Trello for managing the task and tracking discussion.
• Our git protocol.
• GitHub pull request-based code review.
• Shortcuts from thoughtbot/dotfiles.
• Staging and production environments on Heroku.

We will also show a few other goodies:

• Heroku config variables.
• Heroku addons.
• Heroku 2x dynos.
• Using Apache Bench for simple load and memory tests.
• Each dyno handling about ~1,000 requests per minute for a static site.
• Unicorn, Sinatra, and Ruby 2.0’s Copy-On-Write garbage collection.
• Using log2viz for performance and memory visibility.

We will share an open source web application and a read-only Trello board during the presentation. There will be a question-and-answer session at the end.

Hope to see you online! RSVP here.

UPDATE: Heroku has posted a recording to YouTube.

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