Add action to Thunar context menu "Open gVim Here" on Xubuntu

I will show you a quick tip on how to add a custom action to the file browser (Thunar) context menu on Xubuntu to open gVim with the current directory set as the working directory, similar to the "Open Terminal Here" shortcut.

To create the action, open Thunar and go to "Edit -> Configure custom actions...". Click on the "+" icon to create a new action.



Type in a name, and use the following command to do the magic:

vim -g -c "execute 'cd' . %f"

You can now select an icon by clicking on the button next to "Icon" and searching for gVim. Next, switch to the "Appearance Conditions" tab and select only "Directories". Now your all set! To confirm if it works, issue a :pwd after gVim has started.
 

Quick Vim tip: convert piped table to pandoc/RST/Emacs grid table

Inspired by a snippet by Conner McDaniel, I added a little snippet to my .vimrc that can convert a piped table to a grid table used by pandoc/RST/Emacs.

It goes from this:

 Fruit | Price | Advantages         
 Bananas | $1.34 | - built-in wrapper     
 Oranges | $2.10 | - cures scurvy           

To this:

+---------------+---------------+--------------------+
| Fruit         | Price         | Advantages         |
+===============+===============+====================+
| Bananas       | $1.34         | - built-in wrapper |
+---------------+---------------+--------------------+
| Oranges       | $2.10         | - cures scurvy     |
+---------------+---------------+--------------------+

Add this to your .vimrc file:
Now, make a visual selection and type :TablePandoc. It uses tabular.vim to align the pipe characters. Example:

If you have additional tips for using Pandoc from Vim, please let me know in the comments.

Quick Vim tips to make Vim more efficient

Here are some small Vim tweaks I discovered in the past few weeks that makes working with Vim much more efficient. Many of these tips can already be found elsewhere, but these are the ones I found most worthwhile.

Move vertically by visual line

This way, when a line is wrapped, you don't unexpectedly jump over it when navigating your file.

Highlight 81st column when needed

Credits go to Damien Conway (http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/10/more-instantly-better-vim.html)

Open/create folds with the spacebar

This is a really handy setting. You can create folds using a visual selection and spacebar, and toggle them using the spacebar in normal mode.

Use Ag over grep or Ack

Because Ag is awesome and much faster. Let CtrlP use Ag without caching for up to date results, and define an :Ag command that is mapped to backward slash.

Syntastic: show only icons in the gutter

I found it really annoying that everytime there was a small style error in a script, Syntastic opened the location list with the error. Here is how to hide the location list by default and have Syntastic show only an appropriate icon in the gutter.

Copy from Vim to clipboard

This lets you use Ctrl+y to copy text from Vim to your clipboard.

Switch CapsLock and Escape

setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape

In Vim, you have to use the Escape key a lot, but it is awkwardly positioned on the keyboard. With this command, you can change the functionality of the CapsLock and Escape keys. This is much better because CapsLock is next to your home row. I tried two other mappings for a time: jk and kj (because jk does occur quite often in Dutch words). However, I found that hitting CapsLock is much faster.

And of course I use a couple of plugins. My full vimrc file can be found here. If you have any cool vim tips to share, please let me know in the comments.