Or "My customers can't find anything on my site!"

A very tricky problem in web design is how to organise the information on the site into categories. Card sorting solves this problem in a way that's really pretty obvious.

You write out the items you're going to have on the site on cards (assume for a moment we're just talking about a bunch of simple documents you want to publish). Then you take that stack of cards and ask a customer to group them for you. Take a note of what they do, then go see another customer and ask them. Do this with a few customers, the client and maybe some other people and then look what consensus arises.

Frickin' obvious. Gold dust. Thank you DoS.

# Recording (BEST TIP of ALL)
qq  # record to q
your commands
q
@q to execute
@@ to Repeat
# editing a register/recording
"qp
you can now see contents of register q, edit as required
"qdd
# deletes the line back into q

Neat, expecially the part about editing the register contents.

Also :set ff=(unix|dos|mac) and then write the file to sort all your line ending woes.

Turns on ftplugins! Took me ages to work out why they just weren't getting read. That's much better than setting up loads of autocommands. Just have one which sources a file once per buffer, rather than on every BufRead.

I also set up some Mac-like motion key commands, like Apple-right and such, so they behave as they do in standard OS X text controls. This will make it a lot easier for me to make the transition.

au BufRead * set keywordprg=/Users/ben/Documents/bin/google.php
au BufRead *.java set keywordprg=/Users/ben/Documents/bin/google.php\ java\ site:sun.com

Autocommands are a powerful tool in Vim. By assigning autocommands to the BufRead action, I can specify commands to run whenever I move to a buffer. The next argument is a pattern to match on the file name. So here I'm saying, when you transfer to a buffer, set the keyword program to my Googling script. Then if the file is a java file, set the keywordprg to the Google script with some extra arguments which make the search more likely to return Javadoc for the thing I'm Googling.

Result: a custom editing mode for Java which knows more about the document that the standard environment. As I edit more and more files I'll be adding a lot of autocommands for each filetype using much of Vim's functionality, like macros for tags for an HTML mode. Because the menus in Vim are editable from scripts, I can add custom menus for each filetype as well.

It sounds like I should actually be doing this stuff with ftplugins as of version 6 though...

Put but adjust indentation to match the preceeding line.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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