Is it working?

OK.

It's amazing to see so many people show up for this talk.

I've done a few talks before, and conferences, and mostly

people have to choose between two rooms and they never

choose mine.

So this is very good.

I hope you enjoyed some of the food.

I'm afraid it's not enough.

We didn't really expect so many people to show up.

So let me try to make it up by giving you a good

presentation.

It's called 2.0 because I did this presentation in a

different form some years ago in Holland.

And I think none of you were there, so it's all new to you.

But I did update it with some new stuff, so hopefully it

will be interesting.

There's a big crowd now, so I'll try to answer questions

near the end.

But if there's something that you don't understand on the

slides or something like that, just shout.

OK, let's get started.

So text editing, that's what we're talking about.

I think we all know the problem that we're working

with text the whole day, with email, or whatever you're

working on with log files, HTML, documentation, et

cetera, et cetera.

If I look at myself, I spend most of my day editing text,

if I'm not working on Vim, then it's email or something

else, and it takes an awful lot of time.

So if we can improve our text editing skills a little bit,

that helps a lot.

We can get more work done.

Mostly when I'm not working on text editing, then mostly I'm

doing meetings or stuff like that.

So maybe somebody can do a presentation on how to do

effective meetings.

That would help.

So I'm going to try to explain to you how to get more work

done in less time.

So if you're paid by the hour, you can leave now.

Of course, I'm using Vim for all the examples.

That doesn't mean that I think that Vim is the only text

editor that you can use or should use.

As a basic rule, if you have a text editor that's good, that

can do everything you need, has enough features, it does

the work, and you can still expound it to do the work you

expect it to do, than just stick to it.

I mean why learn another editor when you already have

all the skills in the one you're using?

So if you're using index, you're happy with it, I'm not

going to tell you to leave it alone, unless, maybe, you

think it's not good.

Also, I sometimes see people, even software developers,

using Notepad or a similar editor.

I mean, that's terrible.

I mean, you're wasting a lot of time.

So basically, you either use the editor that you have, that

you're happy with, or you switched to Vim.

There's no other rule.

So otherwise, I'm not going to discuss which editor is best.

That's another discussion, and not very interesting.

I think most of the people here are using Vim, anyway.

Oh, let me ask that.

How many people of you are actually mostly using Emacs?

OK, OK.

We'll try to convert some people today.

I won't ask how many people are using Vim, because then

it's all hands up, so let's don't do this.

OK, how are we going to explain these habits that I

was talking about in the title?

The first step, a very important step--

well, all three are important, so.

The first step is how to know that you're doing something

inefficiently.

Mostly, that's when you are repeating the same thing over,

and over, and over again, and you think, well, there must be

a quicker way to do this.

Must be a smarter way to do this.

For example, what I do myself quite often is you have a

function name, somebody refuse your change says, this is a

terrible function name.

Use another name.

So you have to go all over your code and change one name

into another.

Well obviously, if you're going to find the name, type

the same name over and over again, then not only is it not

efficient, you're also going to make mistakes that you have

to fix later.

And it's even getting more complicated, like if you have

five names that you have to change into

five different names.

And there's a pattern in how you change them, and

obviously, you don't want to type that.

You want to find some way to do it quickly.

The trick here is that you have to do this

while you are working.

So every time you're working on something, you have to kind

of look back, like what did I do the last five minutes?

Did I repeat myself?

Can I do this in a quicker way?

So you have to detect your inefficiency.

That's actually quite tricky, but I'm going to give

examples, of course.

Well, find a quicker way.

Well, every good editor has ways to do things quickly.

The trick is, how do you find them?

You don't want to spend the whole day to

find a better solution.

You want to find it in five minutes.

So I'm going to give you some ideas of how to find better

ways, quicker ways.

And the last, and also important, is how

to make it a habit?

You can read the whole reference manual of Vim, but

that doesn't mean you know the commands.

You don't really use them.

So you have to make it a habit to actually use them,

otherwise you'll have to think about every key that you type.

You really want to get the commands in your fingers, done

automatically.

So it must be a habit.

So basically, what you need to do is you have to see the

problem, you have to find a solution, and make it a habit.

That's quite simple, isn't it?

Let's go on.

About the title, I mean, why seven habits?

Why not three, or why not 42?

Well actually, 42 will be a different book.

I saw this book and I read it, and I think it's quite an

interesting book and gives you a lot of tips about work, and

life, and family, and all kinds of things, and I can

recommend it for normal reading, and I

also liked the title.

So I made the title for this presentation a

variant on this title.

Of course, there's also another variant on this title:

seven years of highly defective people.

I just love Dilbert.

This is really a great book that explains a bit about the

characters around Dilbert, and why they are drawn the way

they are drawn, and how they developed over

the first seven years.

It's really a nice book, especially if you like

Dilbert, of course.

OK, let's get on with the first habit.

This is something simple to start with.

So you have these codes, and you're wondering, where is

this variable used?

I used rsc, for example.

So what do you do?

You search for the name.

And you keep pressing n, n, n, n, to find all occurrences of

that variable.

And then you search for another variable, and do the

same thing again, you browse through the whole code.

And then you type a long n.

But if you look closely, you can see there's a typo in

there, so you don't find anything.

Well, this is what happens a lot if you don't know the

commands of your editor.

So you keep typing a lot of text, typing a lot of

commands, and wasting a lot of time, obviously.

So what's a quicker way?

Well, what's important here, how do you find a quicker way?

In this example, I will say that you just search in the

Help for Vim, and you find something about Search

Highlighting.

And you think, well, I'm searching, I want to see

what's going on, so highlighting will help.

And so you turn on the Highlight Search option.

Of course, you need to search a little bit in

Help to find this.

And especially the Star command.

Well, I think most people that actually use Vim know about

the Star command, especially if you looked on the website.

I think it's actually the first step, one

of the first steps.

Well obviously, what you then get is that you get all the

things you were looking for highlighted, and it gives you

a great overview of where a variable's used.

Of course, this is just a small screen.

If you have one of the bigger screens, you have a much

bigger overview, and that works really great.

Of course, the Star command you use when the

cursor is on a word.

So you type Star, and it looks for other

occurrences of that word.

So how do you make this a habit?

Well, the easiest is to switch on Highlight Search in your

Vim RC, file, in your start-up file, so it's always on.

I do that.

I always have the Highlight Search option on.

That does mean that for every search you do,

you see all the matches.

That sometimes means you have a whole yellow screen.

That happens.

And so I added the hint here that you can switch it off for

a moment, and then it's switched on automatically

again when you search for something.

Again, you have to to make it a habit, so just repeat that

Star command.

You have the option switched on, so that works.

You have to use it again and again.

And after a little while, you don't even think of it.

You just look at a variable, you automatically press Star.

There's, of course, many other ways to move around quickly.

Just to mention one, folding was added in Vim 6.

Some people like it, some people don't.

So you'll have to find out yourself if

you like it or not.

Maybe I can switch and give a life--

oh, that's working.

So what I have here is just a source file.

How does this work?

Here you see a marker in the source file with three

brackets, and that actually marks an area in the code that

can be folded away.

So I can just click on the Minus sign.

If I click right.

OK, then it's closed.

Now if we just move around to some of the other folds, I can

move in just by moving the cursor, and it opens so you

can see the code.

It's quite convenient.

So there's a few commands that you can use with folds to move

around, so you have a nice overview of the

functions in your file.

And you can move around, and then move the cursor, and it's

open, so you can then see the code.

Just one of the many ways to quickly move around.

OK, second example.

You know, if you're working with XWindows, you have these

terrible function names that you have to use all the time.

I mean, it's just impossible to type right in at once

unless you are perfect, but nobody's perfect.

And there is small print, there is capital print, and

there's everything.

You type it wrong all the time.

But one solution that people I have seen using is to Copy,

Paste the name.

So you have a list of names, you Copy, Paste them.