your source for Game Z
I woke up to a huge gut punch this morning: Bram Moolenaar, legendary author of the Vim text editor, has passed away. Given the occasion, I want to express some thoughts regarding both Bram and his software. Without his work, I'm not sure I would be the same person.
Vim has good support for showing the differences between two (or three) files
with either the vimdiff command or setting up a diff session manually.
This often requires opening the files in their own window panes, then using
:diffthis in all the relevant files. If you're in the middle of an editing
session, stopping to set up this diff session can cause you to lose focus. I
wrote a function in my vimrc that automates this process, so the user can
focus on making decisions instead of building their UI or some other
flow-breaking process.
Vim is a wonderfully extensible text editor. I use it to work with all sorts of
text. While I was browsing reddit, I saw a thread asking for a way to prevent
:number from counting blank lines. I checked it out to see if there were any
cool answers. None of what I saw were adequate. For instance, :%s/\S\+//n
makes every match highlight, clobbering the last text that was searched for.
I figured it was time for me to learn a little more about Vimscript, and so I
wrote a function that will tell you how many actual lines of code are in your
file: