Vim: hide first n letters of all lines in a file

vim

I am analyzing log file using vim and the format looks like this

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText

Since Most of the times I don't care about date and time. I want to hide them and just focus on the Name and LogText columns (To save some screen estate). Since the first three columns always occupy the first 35 letters in a line. Is there a way to make vim not display first 35 letters of each line ?

Best Answer

You asked about how to hide the first letters, not to remove them, or scroll them out of sight - so here is how to actually hide them:

Hide text in vim using conceal

You can use matching, combined with syntax highlighting and the conceal feature to actually not show matched characters inside lines.

To hide the first 25 chars of each line:

:syn match Concealed '^.\{25\}' conceal
:set conceallevel=2

To hide only the lines with the punctuation of a date instead:

:syn match Concealed '^....-..-.. ..:..:..\..... ' conceal

To unhide:

:syn clear Concealed
:set conceallevel=0

What looks like this normally:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.USEC PID Name LogText

will look like this after executing the first two commands:

PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText
PID Name LogText

See also - inside vim:
help :syn-match
help :syn-conceal
help 'conceallevel'
help 'concealcursor'

(Let me know if it does not behave like that - there may be some more setting I'm not aware of or so - I'll get it to work.)

Related Solutions

Bash Display – Prevent Showing Vim Text After Exit

One of the reasons for that behaviour will be the setting of the terminal for each user.

For example:

User1 is using TERM=xterm, in this case when you exit vim it will clear the terminal.
User2 is using TERM=vt100, in this case when you exit vim it will not clear the terminal.

Check what terminal user1 is using with echo $TERM and set the same for user2. for bash:

TERM=xterm; export TERM

Vim – Format of Default Statusline

Like @muru said, it doesn't seem to possible to exactly simulate the default status line when statusline is set as the code for rendering it does things that can't be specified in the statusline setting. It is possible to get pretty close, however. Here is a reasonable approximation of the way the default status line looks when ruler is enabled:

:set statusline=%f\ %h%w%m%r\ %=%(%l,%c%V\ %=\ %P%)

The main difference is the positioning of the line and column numbers. If it's possible to simulate the default spacing logic, I haven't been able to figure out a way to do it. Perhaps this will be close enough for your purposes.

I use a split version of this in my own .vimrc to place Syntastic status line info in the middle of what looks like a normal vim status line with ruler:

" start of default statusline
set statusline=%f\ %h%w%m%r\ 
" NOTE: preceding line has a trailing space character

" Syntastic statusline
set statusline+=%#warningmsg#
set statusline+=%{SyntasticStatuslineFlag()}
set statusline+=%*

" end of default statusline (with ruler)
set statusline+=%=%(%l,%c%V\ %=\ %P%)

Best Answer

Hide text in vim using conceal

Related Solutions

Bash Display – Prevent Showing Vim Text After Exit

Vim – Format of Default Statusline

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