An old IT ninja learns new Unix tricks
It was with some fascination that I happened across Ian Langworth's "VIM after 11 years" post last week. As a vi/vim user for more than 20 years, I wasn't expecting to learn much. But to my surprise, Langworth revealed many features and tweaks I never would've sought out on my own because -- well, why would I? My vim reflexes have been built up like calluses over decades, long before many of these features and plug-ins were a glimmer in anyone's eye.
Yet I found some very old features that I either never knew about or used so sparingly that they've been archived. The :g// command was one of those items. Despite the fact that :g/re/p in the ed editor was the original impetus for Ken Thompson to write the first stand-alone grep utility, I've never really used :g// in vi/vim. It just never worked its way into my reflexes. In hindsight, that's hard to believe, but I'm apparently not alone in that regard, as Langworth noted in a follow-up article.
