Vim tips

8/18/20

Spellcheck

To highlight misspelled words in a vim session:

:set spell

There are a few handy motions that come with this:

Keystroke Description
z= Display suggested correct spelling for misspelled word under cursor
]s Move cursor to the next misspelled word
[s Move cursor to the previous misspelled word

If you’re interested in a more thorough description of this functionality, :help spell will take you to the docs.


Accented characters

It’s really simple to add characters that don’t exist on common keyboards. While in insert mode,

CTRL-k + <digraph> 

A digraph is basically a pair of keys that represent a character. For example, a' is a digraph for á.

Here’s some of the ones I’ve found useful (prepend each keystroke with CTRL-k).

Digraph Output
~n ñ
a' á
~? ¿
~! ¡

:help i_CTRL-k for more help on this, and :digraphs will display all available digraphs and their output.

Thanks for reading! ☺ (0u is the digraph for the smiley face)