I've been using vim for more than a
decade(!) now, but every so often, I still learn something new that
makes my life a bit easier. Here are two things I learned today.
conque
Emacs users have enjoyed the convenience of using M-x shell to run shell
programs inside an Emacs buffer for years. I found a Python plugin named
conque that does the same for vim.
It works well enough to run vim inside vim (not that I plan to do that
often), and using it to talk to psql while experimenting with schema
changes is very convenient.
+xterm_clipboard
A friend pointed out that vim built with X11 support could yank text to
and from the X clipboard using "*yy and "*p. Ubuntu's vim-gnome package
gave me a console vim built with +X11 and +xterm_clipboard support, and
I got the feature working as advertised after I set "clipboard" to just
"autoselect" (the default setting of "autoselect,exclude:cons\|linux"
caused vim to not connect to the X server at all).
I can now use * and + like any other registers, but one uses the primary
X selection, and the other the X clipboard.
After less than a day of using this feature, I'm already hooked. It's so
much nicer than pasting text into vim in insert mode, and also makes it
easier to exchange text between two vims running in different terminals.