Vim in cloud (draft)

But why?

Let me share my experience from using (adopting?) “vim” into Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

There is plenty of places where you can learn vi/vim basics, all its modes which confuses beginners – I’m assuming you’ve already figured it out.

For many years I’ve been using vim as a standard tool for any unix flavor. And again today, I found it was good investment! I’m new to cloud but I’m little more relaxed finding known tool… and honestly, GCP’s text editor (has it a name?) is like Windows Notepad missing the features :

• to present non-printing characters,
• to diff between files,
• to lock editing,
• regular expressions. 
• but It’s featured with a terrible behave saving everything you type (even unintentionally).
• …

And as you can’t ask for Notepad++, vi/vim rulez for me 😉

Keybindings

So vim is present! But the basic challenge running it in Cloud Workstation (“codespace” in CoPilot) might be keybinding of a webbrowser.

Lets say you need to compare two huge sql-scripts and you want to use:
vim -d a.sql b.sql or vimdiff a.sql b.sql.

You are now in vim’s windows¹. The sequence [Ctrl]+[W], [L] should transfer you to the buffer on right side.

Instead, depending on the browser you use, you immediately leave the workbench or at the best, you get a warning you are about. I couldn’t find the way to redefine browser shortcut. Luckily vim has map -command.

Your press [Esc] to see vim prompt (‘:’) and input

:map <C-B> <C-W> 

(press [Enter])
which means that [Ctrl]+[B] is now an alias for [Ctrl]+[W]. Just memorize the new keybinding.

1. vim’s windows – we are discussing here the feature you can learn from the help
   ([ESC] :help windows):
   Editing with multiple windows and buffers. windows buffers
   The commands which have been added to use multiple windows and buffers
   …
   ↩︎

to be continued…