Posts tagged: vim

I don’t run into Windows file endings very often, so when I see little ^M’s all over your file, I think “shit I know what these are and can’t remember” They represent the Windows carriage return.

Linux vs Unix Line Endings #

The difference here is that Unix uses \n and Linux uses \r\n, going all the way back to the typewriter it represents the two keys that a typist would have to press to get a new line and return the carriage back to the beginning.

Vim/Neovim #

When I open up a file and see this garbage all over, it’s not cozy, I want them gone, I don’t want them all over my editor. I’m not sure what this would look like on Windows, I haven’t been able to afford a Windows machine in years, but its gross on my machine.

Remove them with a substitution command from normal mode.

:%s/\r//g

Just give em the ol one eyed fighting Kirby

This is a vim substitution technique to capture the rest of the line as a capture group.

:'<,'>s/longhorn\(.*\)/longhorn\1-rwx

This one captures pesky optional " and places it back at the end if it found one.

:'<,'>s/longhorn\("\?\)\(.*\)/longhorn\2-rwx\1

Today I discovered vim-speeddating by tpope. I’m sure I’ve seen years ago but it did not click for my workflow until today. I often go through pictures from my phone for the past few days and make Posts tagged: shots posts, but I want to date them to about when the image was taken most of the time. This allows me to quickly bump days up and down using c-a and c-x even around the new year.

Vim :noa is a command that runs what you call without autocommands on. This is typically used when you have some BufWritePre commands for formatting, most auto formatters are implemented this way in vim. It can be super useful if you have something like a yaml/json file that you have crafted perfectly how you want it, maybe it has some source code for a small script or sql embeded and your formatter wants to turn it into one line. You could get a better formatter, but for these one off cases that aren’t a big bother to me I run :noa w.

:noa w

When I want to put a date in a document like a blog post from vim I use !!date from insert mode. Note that entering !! from normal mode puts you in command mode with :.! filled out. This runs a shell command, i.e. date for this example.

It outputs the following

Fri Jan 31 08:46:11 PM CST 2025

You can also pass in a date such as tommorrow by pasdding in the -d date -d tomorrow.

It outputs the following

Sat Feb 1 08:53:20 PM CST 2025

codeium just taught me this one with autocomplete

:put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

This outputs the following

2025-01-31

What I like about the :put =strftime( method is that you can add a format, but that is a lot more for me to remember than !!date

A few weeks later #

I’m going through a bunch of blog posts and dont want my date formats to change to the Wed Feb format so I broke down and made these keybindings. I think I’m still going to be using .!date a lot, but these keybindings will be nice for editing blog post frontmatter.

set("n", "<leader>dd", "<cmd>put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d')<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })
set("n", "<leader>dt", "<cmd>put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })

• dd 2025-02-12
• dt 2025-02-12 12:53:47
• :.!date Wed Feb 12 12:53:47 PM CST 2025

Vim has a handy feature to format text with gq. You can use it in visual mode, give it a motion, or if you give it gqq it will format the current line. I use this quite often while writing in markdown, I do not use softwraps in vim, so gqq quickly formats my current line into a paragraph. Once I have done this for a single line one time I typically switch to the motion for around paragraph gqap to format the whole paragraph and not just the current line.

before formatting #

after formattting #

So after months of fighting with gf not going to template files, I finally decided to put in some effort to make it work.

This was the dumbest keybind in my config, that I copied from someone else without understanding it.

What I am trying to do #

I have jinja templates in a directory called templates. I want to bind gf to open a template file, but it is trying to open a new file ./base.html

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% if request.state.user %}
    {% block title %}Fokais - {{ request.state.user.full_name }} {% endblock %}
{% else %}
    {% block title %}Fokais {% endblock %}
{% endif %}
{% block content %}
    {% if request.state.user %}
        <h1 id="title"
            class="inline-block mx-auto text-5xl font-black leading-loose
            text-transparent bg-clip-text bg-gradient-to-r from-red-600
            via-pink-500 to-yellow-400 ring-red-500 text-shadow-xl
            text-shadow-zinc-950 ring-5">
            {{ request.state.user.full_name }}
        </h1>
    {% endif %}
    {% include "me_partial.html" %}
{% endblock %}

What did not work #

I tried all sorts of changes to my path, but it still didn’t work.

vim.api.nvim_command("set path+=templates/**")

What I found #

after digging into my keymap I found that I had remaped gf to edit years ago. This works great if the file is in your current directory, and if it’s not it makes the file. This bind completely breaks vim’s ability to :find files and was a terrible keybind that I added probably from someone else years ago and have literally never used this feature. If gf opens an empty file I always close it and assume that vim failed to :find the file.

-- Allow gf to open non-existent files
set("", "gf", ":edit <cfile><CR>")

Yes, after that fix I still needed to adjust my path #

I ended up with the following in my options.lua.

-- look for jinja templates in the templates directory
vim.opt.path:append("templates/**")