A Vid in which Vim Saves Me Hours & Hundreds of Clicks

URGENT! Read this: lukesmith.xyz/deletion

>didn't train a neural network to identify pdf titles automatically

You're the only person I've seen so far that actually takes advantage of tiling windows + terminal applications, everyone else seems to be wasting time with "I can customize it to do anything" but never get anything done, I don't want waste time customizing for no benefit. Sadly I don't see how I could impove my current workflow with this format, but it's really cool. PS: It would be real magic if we could get a stdout of a pdf.

I had no idea that vim could do this! All I ever knew about vim was how to quit it (after accidentally opening it and then spending a couple of minutes googling how to exit). Thanks :D

This is awesome, Luke! The exact type of video I was hoping you would make.

I use vim all the time but admittedly I've never put in the effort to become this much of a wizard with it. Next time I have a task like this (could be years) I'll pull this video back up again though!

Do a flip with vim.

Thanks for sharing these vim tips! I'll share how I normally generate such files with a BASH loop:- for i in *.pdf; do echo -e "$(pdfinfo "$i"|sed -n '1s/^Title: *//p')" >>links.html;done This will write the HTML tags for each PDF found in the directory, and use the Title extracted with pdfinfo as the linked content. It might save a bit of time. Doing this stuff can be tedious.

The first part was just ls *pdf | sed 's/.*/<++><\\a>/' > file. But I had no idea about all the other abilities of vim!

I use vim since maybe 10 years and I used this editor like a begginer all this time (I used only 2 modes, no buffers, and basic commands like w, q, y, p, b, w). Now I try to use it more like a poweruser because I want to be more productive when I write my thesis and I am surprised how this editor is powerful if you use it correctly. The "visual block" mode is magic. I never seen something like that from an other editor/program.

Arrived for the thumbnail, stayed for dank knowledge 👌🔥

Maybe I missed the part where he said it, but you can of course use r instead of read, and the space may be omitted if you use external commands. This might save time if you often do short external commands like these: :r!ls *pdf r!date etc

Cool, I just watched and read my first lessons on Vim earlier today, and I was going back and forth debating on if I should learn it or not...and this video showed me a good reason why I should bother going down that path.

I just started trying to get used to Vim a couple of weeks ago since everyone says that nano is nooby, hadn't really read any advanced tutorial either, just learned to navigate mostly. This stuff is amazing!

This is the type of stuff I subscribed for :D

Thanks for zooming the text! Made table viewing feasible.

1:31 pdfinfo (part of the poppler-utils package) will show info about PDF files such as titles. But these don’t always match the text you see on the title page of the document.

Awesome vid, every time I watch one of these it just reinforces to me that I only use a fraction of vim.

Nice example of mapping a key to bring up "mupdf" as an external command; but in split screen. BTW: You could wrap your file names in tags with just one ":vi" command line, rather than 2 steps: :g/pdf/s/\(.*\)/<a href="\1"><++></a>/ ( which translates to ) global-find all lines with "pdf" then substitute \( line-match \) with pre_text \1=insert-match end_text Note: REgex of ".*" matches whole line \( \) remembers it, and \1 shows where to re-insert string. "vi/vim" editor's :colon: command line has full "ex" editor commands for lots of bulk edit magic. Also: If you are more comfortable with "sed" you could use "!G" to pipe the whole file through cmd sed -e 's/^/<a href="' -e 's/$/><++></a>/' for the same effect... or if you like 'awk', use !G to pipe text through: awk '/pdf/{print("<a href="+$0+"><++></a>")}' ... but you could have added either of those pipes, when you ran the "ls" command at 2:18

Wow so many uploads.. Wish you all the best, Luke.