May 30, 2002
Vim
Today's top Vim tip. To escape special characters in vi you prefixed them with ^v (that is ctrl-v to all of you Windows users ;-) This doesn't work in Vim because ctrl-v is the now ubiqituous short cut for 'paste'. To escape a special character in Vim use ^q (ctrl-q). Sweet. As an example, if you have an SQL select statement and you would like each column in the select clause on a separate line, just type :s/, /,<ctrl-q><ctrl-m>/g and Bob will be your Auntie's live in lover.
Oh, and to be fair to the emacsen I almost installed that other editor on my machine at work today. When you finally get to the download page at http://www.xemacs.org/ (hint, it is at the stunningly obvious URL of http://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/binaries/wind32/installshield/) the Windows installer is 23.3Mb - do you have any idea how long that takes to download over a 56k line? Maybe another time.
Posted by Andy Todd at May 30, 2002 09:13 AM