As others have said, you could use :set list which will, in combination with :set listchars=… display invisible characters. Now, there isn’t an explicit option which you can use to show whitespace, but in listchars, you could set a character to show for everything BUT whitespace. For example, mine looks like this :set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:< so, … Read more
Use the > command. To indent five lines, 5>>. To mark a block of lines and indent it, Vjj> to indent three lines (Vim only). To indent a curly-braces block, put your cursor on one of the curly braces and use >% or from anywhere inside block use >iB. If you’re copying blocks of text … Read more
VIM has basically two modes: Command Mode (called also “Normal Mode” below) and Insert Mode. Most likely you are in “insert mode” which does (not surprisingly) insert what you type, while in “command mode” it would try to execute the commands you give (such as :quit). However VIM indicates when it is in insert mode … Read more
As ZyX said on #vim, this question sounds like “Why do Vim experts prefer tasty over warm?”. “Vim experts” don’t prefer buffers over tabs: they use buffers as the file proxies they are and tab pages as the workspaces they are. Buffers and tab pages have different purposes so preferring one to the other makes … Read more
Your problem with Vim is that you don’t grok vi. You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut whole lines. In fact programmers, editing source code, very often want to work on whole lines, ranges of lines and blocks of code. However, yy is only one of many way … Read more
Use \r instead of \n. Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things: \n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r … Read more
Hit the Esc key to enter “Normal mode”. Then you can type : to enter “Command-line mode”. A colon (:) will appear at the bottom of the screen and you can type in one of the following commands. To execute a command, press the Enter key. :q to quit (short for :quit) :q! to quit … Read more