Frequently useful

• LOTS of regexp examples
  • filter out lines (can use g!/^dd/d to do the opposite)
• solving the problem that deleting/changing often overwrites the default buffer:
  • registers 0-9 contain the last 10 things that were yanked/cut/whatever
  • :reg displays the contents of the above registers, and more

Things I use less, but are nonetheless useful to know

• to stop the automatic adding of newlines at the end of files, do set binary and set noeol
• to stop auto-indenting in HTML files, use autocmd BufEnter *.html setlocal indentexpr=
• let perl_fold=1 + folding commands
• there are various options for making vim start up in insert mode, from scripts and such. I'm kind of partial to something like vim +99999 -c startinsert.
• modeline is what I've been looking for to be able to put vim-specific config commands in program's headers
• You may want to disable viminfo. One thing about viminfo is that it tries to use a single viminfo file per user. This seems to result in a huge amount of hunting around sometimes, ocassionally on filesystems that are extremely slow.
  • putting "set viminfo=" in your .vimrc will help on shutdown, but not startup
  • for startup, there are only two options?
    • launch with `vim -i NONE`
    • re-compile vim with the viminfo feature removed
• If you don't want Vim to touch your $HOME drive at all (on windows, for instance), you can actually use vim to patch itself:

  c:\> copy gvim.exe gvim2.exe
  c:\> gvim -b gvim2.exe
  

  I generally just do this replacement everywhere: "$HOME/" ⇒ "$VIM/_"
• Similarly, you can completely disable viminfo by binary-editing the .exe itself, and replacing the "$" with a chr(0x00) everywhere something like "$VIM\_viminfo" is found. To do this, press this sequence of characters while positioned over the "$": r, ctrl-v, 0, period. It's easiest to repeat with the period, of course.