The VimL Primer: Edit Like a Pro with Vim Plugins and Scripts

Build on your editor’s capabilities and tailor your editing experience with VimL, the powerful scripting language built into Vim. With VimL you can configure basic settings or add entirely new functionality. Use this quick and easy introduction to create your own Vim plugin while learning the concepts and syntax of VimL.

VimL is the scripting language of the Vim editor. If you’ve ever edited or saved a vimrc file, you’ve written VimL. And VimL can do much more than simply configure settings and specify option values–you can write entire plugins in VimL. But without a background in scripting Vim, it can be hard to know where to start.

The VimL Primer gives you the tools and confidence you need. It gets you comfortable in VimL quickly, walking you through creating a working plugin that you can run yourself as you write it in Vim. You’ll learn how to script common commands and buffer interaction, work with windows and buffers from within a plugin script, and how to use autocommands to have Vim recognize entirely new filetypes. You’ll discover how to declare filetype-specific settings and define your own syntax elements for use with Vim’s syntax highlighting. And you’ll see how you can write your own command-line commands and define new mappings to call them.

With this introduction to scripting Vim, your own Vim extensions are only plugins away. Take control of your editor!

What You Need::

Vim version 7 or later is required, and it’s available on any of the major operating systems. This book uses the “Huge” version of Vim 7.4.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Lay of the Land
Chapter 2. A Real Live Plugin
Chapter 3. The Autoload System
Chapter 4. Recognizing File Types
Chapter 5. Highlighting Syntax
Chapter 6. Commands and Mappings