Tabs in vim

You can open several files in tabs from the command line with vim, just type:

vim -p file1 file2 file3

And each file specified on the command line will be opened in a new tab.

To open a file in a new tab inside vim use :tabe file

To close a tab do :tabc

You can quickly switch between tabs typing gt or gT in normal mode. To switch to a particular tab prepend the tab number to gt, i.e. type #gt, where #gt is the tab number.

Avoid the need to escape parenthesis, brackets… in vim regexes

Vim has a so called “very magic” mode for regexes which allows you to use parenthesis, brackets, the alternative separator (i.e. ‘|’), pluses, etc. with their special meaning but without the need to escape those characters.

(see :help /\v)

Example:

Let’s say you have the following in your buffer:

12345aaa678
12345bbb678
12345aac678

If you execute

:%s/\d\{5\}\(\D\+\)\d\{3\}/\1/

you will get

aaa
bbb
aac

but it required a lot of backslash escaping in the regex. You can avoid the need to escape parenthesis, curly braces, pluses, etc. using vim’s “very magic” mode for regexes. The following would do exactly the same as the previous substitution command but with fewer escaping required:

:%s/\v\d{5}(\D+)\d{3}/\1/

Cycle through the last argument of previous commands in Bash

In Bash, when I want to repeat the last argument of the previous command, I usually type !$. I just discovered that you can also use ALT+. to cycle through the last argument of previous commands.

ESC-g for glob expansion in bash

Just like <TAB> expands a filename given a prefix you can also expand a file name given the middle part of a file name.

Example:

$ ls
abc1def  abc2def  abc3def  abc4def  abc5def
$ ls *2*<ESC>g

Which will expand to:

$ ls abc2def

via a stackoverflow question