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.