VIM – How to Bold, Italic, Underline and Hypertext Specific Words

fontsvim

I am new in VIM. I am writing some files using VIM. I did enough research but didn't get the answer anywhere! I just wanted to know how can I Bold, Italic and Underline a word in VIM. Also I want to create anchor text external links from my file. But after digging in Google I really didn't find enough info. Can anybody tell me how can I create anchor text links in my VIM files like this one.. Super User.

Best Answer

Vim is a text editor with syntax highlighting; it's not a word processor. That said, you can indeed edit common markup text formats like HTML, Markdown, Textile, Mediawiki, etc., and Vim will highlight marked-up text (according to the formatting capabilities of Vim and the used environment; i.e. GVIM allows more styles and colors than the terminal version).

For that to work, you need

:syntax on

in your ~/.vimrc, and ensure that the right 'filetype' is detected / set (e.g. :edit +setf\ html foo.html).

Related Solutions

How to create the own tag files with Vim for interconnected non-code text

If I understood right (and that's a capital IF) what you are looking for is basic vim help functionality. You define a tag (some_word) a lot of jumppoints (|jumppoint|) and that's it.

Without going into the details I'd really recommend you glance through the

:help tags

help file. It will explain a lot. I haven't done this in a while, but basically it comes down to this. You need to define tags (**), and then introduce them into vim's tag system via :helptags command. After that, don't move them, and when using jumppoints it will lead you to them via already mentioned Ctrl-] and T.

ctags and the like should not worry you ... this is completely vim's functionality, and they have nothing to do with it (they only come into the story when code comes into it ... and even then, in some cases, if you're willing to do some manual labour they can be avoided).

How to underline a word in Vim

Bearing in mind that Vim is a (some might say the) text editor and not a word processor, there are two ways this can be addressed.

Updating the file

Assuming that you want to edit the text file to underline a heading or similar. You can do this by duplicating the line using yy]p (or :t .<CR>) and replacing the text with hyphens with a :substitute command like :s!\S!-!g.

Of course you will need to :write this file to preserve these.

Formatting the display

Alternatively, you can use the :match functionality to underline the text in your editor without touching the file:

:match Underlined /someword\|otherword/

You would need to add this to a startup script (such as vimrc) to persist this formatting.

See :help :match in Vim for more information.