http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
- Fix it when it's wrong
It's normal to make errors while typing. Nobody can avoid it. The trick is to quickly spot and correct them. The editor should be able to help you with this. But you need to tell it what's wrong and what's right.
Very often you will make the same mistake again and again. Your fingers just don't do what you intended. This can be corrected with abbreviations. A few examples:
:abbr Lunix Linux
:abbr accross across
:abbr hte the
The words will be automatically corrected just after you typed them.
The same mechanism can be used to type a long word with just a few characters. Especially useful for words that you find hard to type, and it avoids that you type them wrong. Examples:
:abbr pn penguin
:abbr MS Mandrake Software
However, these tend to expand to the full word when you don't want it, which makes it difficult when you really want to insert "MS" in your text. It is best to use short words that don't have a meaning of their own.
To find errors in your text Vim has a clever highlighting mechanism. This was actually meant to be used to do syntax highlighting of programs, but it can catch and highlight errors as well.
Syntax highlighting shows comments in colour. That doesn't sound like an important feature, but once you start using it you will find that it helps a lot. You can quickly spot text that should be a comment, but isn't highlighted as such (you probably forgot a comment marker).Or see a line of code highlighted as comment (you forgot to insert a "*/"). These are errors which are hard to spot in a B&W file and can waste a lot of time when trying to debug the code.
The syntax highlighting can also catch unbalanced braces. An unbalanced ")" is highlighted with a bright red background. You can use the % command to see how they match, and insert a "(" or ")" at the right position.
Other common mistakes are also quickly spotted, for example using "#included <stdio.h>" instead of "#include <stdio.h>". You easily miss the mistake in B&W, but quickly spot that "include" is highlighted while "included" isn't.
A more complex example: for English text there is a long list of all words that are used. Any word not in this list could be an error. With a syntax file you can highlight all words that are not in the list. With a few extra macros you can add words to the wordlist, so that they are no longer flagged as an error. This works just as you would expect in a word processor. In Vim it is implemented with scripts and you can further tune it for your own use: for example, to only check the comments in a program for spelling errors.
http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html