Thomas Lee

Published by tom on September 22, 2007 01:40 pm under Software Development

Anybody familiar with writing vim scripts will probably be familiar with this syntax:

let foo = 5

Those with slightly more experience may even be familiar with the assignment of local and global variables:

let l:foo = 5

let g:foo = 5

But what you might not know is that you can also assign values directly to registers:

let @a = 5
echo @a
input('Press a key to continue ...')
let @a = 10
echo @a

… and environment variables:

let $JAVA_HOME = "/usr/local/java5"
echo $JAVA_HOME
let $JAVA_HOME = "/usr/local/java6"
echo $JAVA_HOME

Makes for some interesting possibilities in vim scripts!

2 Comments so far

rms on September 22nd, 2007

isn’t that something.
been using for 30 years in emacs.
OJ on September 24th, 2007

@rms: That’s a typical comment by an emacs fanboy.

@Tom: I wasn’t aware of the local/global assignments, that’s pretty handy. Haven’t had to write VIM scripts for a while, but I’ll bear this in mind next time I do Cheers for the ref!