Even More New VIM Fun

It appears that my last article generated a bit of interest! I had one good friend share some enlightening tips with me after he read about my findings. He opened my eyes to the world of abbreviations in VIM. Oh boy, oh boy!!

I'll pretty much just continue today's earlier post, by showing another (super awesome) way to insert blocks into your Django templates. If you were to enter this line into your ~/.vimrc file...

ab bl <Esc>bi{% block <Esc>ea %}{% endblock %}<Esc>h%i

...you would be able to type this...

content bl

...while you're in insert mode. As soon as you hit your spacebar after the bl, VIM would turn it into...

{% block content %} {% endblock %}

...and put you in insert mode between the two tags. Perfect!

For those of you who are interested in understanding the abbreviation, first it will take you out of insert mode (<Esc>). Then it jumps to the beginning of the word before the bl abbreviation and drops back into insert mode (bi). Next it inserts {% block and hops out of insert mode long enough to move the cursor to the end of the word you typed before the bl abbreviation. It finishes inserting {% endblock %}, gets out of insert mode, goes back a character (to account for the space you typed after bl) (h), moves the cursor to the matching opening brace for the } at the end of {% endblock %} (%), and finally puts you back into insert mode (i). Whew! It's all the same old VIM stuff, just packed into one uber-powerful abbreviation!

Thank to Jonathan Geddes for the guidance on this! I find this method to be superior to the one I posted about earlier because you don't even have to leave insert mode to get the code block stuff inserted into your templates!