Another Vim tips piece is up on Linux.com today, this time I covered mappings and abbreviations.
I make heavy use of mappings and abbreviations for several things, correcting common typos (like thier instead of their, or teh instead of the), long names or names with foreign characters when I’m writing a news story with several last names that are easy to misspell, and inserting snippets of text — like HTML tags — that are a PITA to type over and over and over again.
For example, if you were writing a piece where you interviewed Bob Wexleblat-Platypus, you probably wouldn’t want to type “Wexleblat-Platypus” twenty times — especially since you might not spell it correctly each time.
Instead, set a temporary abbreviation. Run :ab wx Wexleblat-Platypus, and then each time you’re writing “Wexleblat-Platypus says…” you’d just type “wx says” and Vim would do the rest.
Of course, that’s just a silly name, but some folks in the open source community do have tricky names… I know a lot of folks seem to have trouble getting Brockmeier right, too.
