Ah, Blogger's back already.

VIm, the editor that keeps on giving. Seriously, there's a certain amount of this thing that you can be trained to use, but so much of it is simply using it year after year, finding increasingly (?) obscure things your workflow wishes you could do more quickly, and then slowly stalagmiting more and more wacky key combinations into the folds of your brain to make it all happen at light speed sans mouse. Man, I love editing without a mouse.

Today's lesson was in blockwise visual mode, which I hadn't used [intentionally] before:

Mark the area which is to be commented using the *blockwise* visual mode (CTRL-V, in Windows this is CTRL-Q).

Press I (capital i) and write the text you want to prepend to each line of the selected block, e.g. %.

Then press ESC and the text will be inserted to the left of each line of the selected block.


PhpStorm is a pretty good PHP IDE, about as good as you can get other than its rough edges, and it has a buggy and incomplete but pretty good VIm clone as an optional extension. It, with PhpMyAdmin and SQuirreL SQL, really is reasonably close to achieving AMP stack programming perfection.

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