LazyVim for Ambitious Developers: Chapter 14 Released
Hi everyone!
I just released Chapter 14, which is a grab-bag of random tips I’ve stumbled over in many years of using Vim. As much as possible I had tried to scatter these sorts of tips throughout the books in places where they were relevant to the content, but there were enough nifty ideas left over that I decided to dedicate a short chapter to them.
If you have a favourite tip that I missed, let me know! I love to be surprised by the things I don’t know about *vim.
On Patreon, Chapters 17 and 18 are now available. I’m planning to edit down and upload the last two chapters sometime in the next week.
I’ve started porting the book to Asciidoc. This is coming with pros and cons… the main pro is that the ebook will look way better than the current preview PDF output, and the print book will become, well, possible. The main drawback is that I will lose some of the carefully constructed customizations (damn you, inadvertent alliteration! shakes fist) on the web version of the book. The most notable omission will be a lack of light-themed screenshots, which is probably just as well because I’ve noticed the light theme looks kind of wrong in some of the more advanced windows (e.g. the debugger). I may also lose offline support and some of the links to “non-book” content, such as the errata form may be harder to find.
But it’s worth it to not have to maintain two sources of truth, and I’ll do everything I can to keep most of the niceties in place.
In LazyVim news, Folke has released a bunch of quality of life improvements including a major update to which-key that adds icons to all the keybinding menus. So I have to retake a bunch of screenshots.
He’s also added the ctrl-w keybindings under <space>-w, which kind of negates my Chapter 9 recommendation to remap \ to ctrl-w. It’s still an extra keypress, but they are easy keypresses that give you the option of using \ for some other important keybinding if you want.
One cool new feature is <space>-w-<space> which puts the menu in “hydra” mode. This allows you to repeat multiple window related commands without the menu closing on you. I especially recommend using it for window resizing. Press <space>-w-<space> followed by < or > as many times as you need to resize the current window, then <Escape> to exit hydra mode.
I’ve got a to-do to add this info to the book before publication!
Cheers,
Dusty Phillips