Advanced filtering utilities in Vim
Efficient Search and Replace
© Lead Image © adimas, fotila.com
Whether you are writing code or text, vim-abolish can help you customize search and replace functions in Vim.
Traditionally, vim-abolish is introduced by saying that what it does is hard to explain. This tradition dates back to its creator Tim Pope, who introduced it by saying that "I've deferred release, primarily because it's so gosh darn hard to explain" [1]. However, while exactly what is being abolished is uncertain, vim-abolish can best be described as advanced search and replace functions, roughly analogous to but less powerful than the command sed. It consists of four utilities: abbreviation (word completion), substitution, search, and coercion (case change). With a bit of organization, you can set up these utilities to use multiple forms of a word, such as different tenses, prefixes, suffixes, or spellings. With these tools, vim-abolish is equally useful for writing code or text documents.
Vim-abolish is installed by downloading the plugin from its homepage [1] to ~/.vim or ~\vimfiles, depending on your distribution. If you are using the plugin manager Pathogen, you can install Git and run the commands:
cd ~/.vim/bundle git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish.git
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