What's this all about?

Vim is powerful text-editor, designed to be very user-friendly, so long as you're a pro-user. Short but obtuse key-combos, unintuitive (to most) editing, and arcane configuration. With experience, though, it can be an excellent tool.

What's a vimbit?

The main way you configure Vim is with a .vimrc file. The configuration, though, is a language of it's own. The combinations are endless, and the level of customization you can achieve is one of the strengths of the Vim editor. A Vimbit is a line or small set of lines that, when put into a vimrc file, perform a certain task: remapping the escape key to something more convenient, limiting line lenght to 80 characters, setting a key combination to toggle whitespace visiblity, etc.

Show me one.

Sample Vimbit (credit to Steve Losh ) to make the oft-typed colon slightly quicker:

Remap ; to :

Fishtoaster posted this on Febuary 19, 2011

nnoremap ; : 
vnoremap ; :

The colon is used so frequently that it seems silly not to make it a single key on the home row. Don't map : back to ;, as it breaks a bunch of plugins.

remapping common-keys

What's this site?

The state of the art for finding vimbits seems to be to crawl well-known Vim-ers' public vimrcs on github, or watch for "vimrc" threads on /r/vim, or follow vim-related twitter accounts. There are plenty of vim resources out there, but most focus on Vim as a whole- the basic commands, the modes of use, plugins, colorschemes, and configuration. Vimbits is here to focus entirely on that last one- the content of your vimrc.

Share your favorite vimbits. Find cool new ones. Check out the top few and see what you think!

Who made this?

Kevin Kuchta built it in early 2012. If you see him on reddit or hackernews or something, he goes by fishtoaster and kkuchta. He maintains and runs Vimbits. A handful of helpful, talented, and good looking contributors have put in work too- they can be found on the github page.

I want to help/complain/contact you!

If you have a quick question, hit me up on Twitter. If you have an issue with the site, open up a ticket on the Vimbits Github. That's also the place to go if you want to contribute a fix, correct spellingmistake, etc.