All my friends know that I’m a big fan of Vim. I use Vim to program in C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript and whatever language I have to. I do that because Vim is simple and powerful. It supports regular expressions to search and replace text. It leads you to the function’s man page with a simple shortcut.
You can use Vim as a development environment for your projects. Instead of using one IDE for each language you program in, you can just use Vim.
If you have used Vim for more than 1 year, you probably know most of the tips I’m giving here.
###1 - Man page
When you are programming in C, PHP, Perl…. your system’s man page may have the documentation for the function of the language that you are using. On Debian-based distributions, install the package manpages-dev.
sudo apt-get install manpages-dev
Then, if you point the cursor over the word printf and press <Alt>+K Vim will lead you to the printf man page.
###2 - Tabs
Developers usually have to edit multiple files at once. Vim has tabs in a similar way to Firefox. To open a new tab you can just use:
:tabe file.c
Use Ctrl+Alt+PageUp and Ctrl+Alt+PageDown to navigate between the tabs.
###3 - Vertical Split
Split is very useful. It lets you see two or more files on the same screen at once. Simple split is used in the same way