Review - Hacking Vim
I got a copy of book Hacking Vim - Kim Schulz (Packt Publishing) during last week of June 2007. Being a Unix corporate trainer, teaching to use vim as power user to major corporates in India, I was immediately interested in the book.
After reading a few pages I realized that the book was not meant for newbies at all. The book is aimed for coders who already know vim properly and want to stretch it further. In my opinion it is like a "Tips and Tricks" book for Vim with lot of explanation wherever required. The author has covered a range of Vim versions and has done a good job marking version on which each hack can be expected to work.
Chapter 1 is just a standard introductory chapter on Vim like history and some famous clones of vim.
Chapter 2 is about customizing vi for own needs by setting the vimrc and allied files.
Chapter 3 is for power users who want to navigate in vim fast. This chapter talks in detail about buffers and navigation between them. Also, searching in multiple files and marking text with visible and invisible marker is covered to satisfaction.
Chapter 4 is about "Production Booster" hacks. It covers templates, auto-completion and tags. In my opinion the part on template could have been expanded more along with the part for macro recording. For me, the section on "SESSIONS" was too big for this book.
Chapter 5 on "Advanced Formatting" is a nice chapter on advanced formatting code or pieces of codes. The author explains indentation in small but easy paragraphs. This chapter also talks about using external programs to indent text.
Chapter 6 which is about scripting vim is the biggest chapter in the book. It starts with basics of vim scripting and goes to advance topics like installing, debugging, distributing scripts etc.
Overall "Hacking Vim" is a nice much needed handy book for vim hacks.