Cream: Making Vim a Little Bit Easier for the Rest of Us
Are you wanting to learn longtime geek favorite text editor Vim, but maybe you’ve having some trouble wrapping your head around all the keyboard commands? Sweeten the deal with Cream, a set of scripts that modernizes gVim, the GTK 2.0 Vim adaptation. Basically it just changes some shortcuts so they’re more like what you would expect (Ctrl+C for Copy, for example) and adds menu entries for advanced functions, if you can’t remember the correct the keybinding.
I know Vim purists probably won’t like it too much, but it really helps Vim newbies like me get a handle on the full capabilities of the application. There’s even a menu entry that allows you to select one of several easy-on-the-eyes color schemes. I had never considered Vim as a writing tool (always thought it was more for coders) but now that I’ve found features like spell check, paragraph folding, color schemes, and powerful navigation options, I might be using Vim to write my next research paper/newspaper article.
Does Vim rock your world, or is it too hard? Did Cream make life easier for you? Let us know in the comments.
Filed under: Text Editing
Do you know a good tutorial to achieve autocompletion in Cream? (like brackets, parethesis, etc)
I haven’t found a tutorial, but I know that the default keybinding is ctrl space, and that the menu option is located in Tools > Completion. Basically it will just give you completion options if the word your cursor is on matches another in your document.
Alternatively, you can also use “complete from template,” which is also in th Completion menu, which allows a sort of Snippits-like function.
PS Let us know how it works for you!
I downloaded Cream. Interesting work. I liked some of it but really regular old vim is fine with me. Thanks for pointing it out Nathan. TS