Notes

Vim History

less .viminfo to view recent history in vim. could possibly recover lost files / information if needed.

Custom .vimrc

If ~/.vimrc does not exist in your home directory, create it, and customize it to suit your needs. For example, the following .vimrc will set your tab size to 2 from the default 4, and convert your tabs to spaces automatically. This is useful when sharing code, as things are more compact and using spaces is less ambiguous than tab sizes across platforms.

set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab autoindent mouse=a

Here, tabstop is the tab size setting, measured in spaces. shiftwidth allows vim to compensate according to our tab settings when automatically indenting, etc. expandtab converts our tab size setting into actual spaces. set autoindent will set vim to automatically indent to our current depth when in insert mode and moving to a new line by pressing enter. This will not insert spaces unless text is input. mouse=a enables mouse interaction with split windows, when supported.

Split Windows in Vim

Run the commands below to split windows while within a Vim session -

:split /path/to/file # To split horizontally
:vsplit /path/to/file # To split vertically

OR

:sp /path/to/file # To split horizontally
:vs /path/to/file # To split vertically

:open /path/to/file # To open a file within the active tab

:retab # To resize tabs in this session to your .vimrc configuration

Use Ctrl-w <Arrow Keys> or Ctrl-w <h j k l> to move between split windows.
Use Ctrl-w w to move to the next window, Ctrl-w W to move to the previous.
Ctrl-w c, :q, :close, or :clo to close the active window.
Close all other windows with Ctrl-w o, :only, or :on.