Historical errata for Practical Vim, Second Edition

Both mobipocket and ePub versions of the Book do not show cursor position and search highlighting / visual selection on my iPhone 6s / iOS 9 with kindle/iBooks app. First edition 1.1 mobi and second edition pdf are working as intended.

In the aside, “Extending ctags or Using a Compatible Tag Generator”, in the middle of the first paragraph we have:

“…option of droping down into C…”

where “droping” -> “dropping”.

The mentioned path ‘ex_mode/shopping-list.todo’ does not match the one in the zip-archive for download the path is: ‘cmdline_mode/shopping-list.todo’.

However, online referenced path works:
media.pragprog.com/titles/dnvim/code/ex_mode/shopping-list.todo

Probably zip-archive should be updated.

This is very anal, sorry, but…

Paragraph beginning “That moves the cursor to line 3”: `:3p` isn’t any faster than `3Gdd`; it is the same number of strokes and requires you to leave the home row more.

footnote 1: The source code URL is the concatenation of “http”, “://” and "pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/source_code

Vim defines a filter as “a program that accepts text as standard
input, changes it some way, and sends it to standard output.”

“in” is missing
changes it in some way

The second paragraph starts with:

“Consider the commands :argdo , :bufdo , and :cfdo commands.”
That’s too many “commands”.

The reference to tip 74 in the next to last paragraph is displayed as “Tip 74, Use the, on page 187”
The title of the tip contains an escaped character which might be the reason.
“Use the \\v Pattern Switch for Regex Searches”

I suggest an improvement in the description of entering control characters.

The current text says that Ctrl-s means “Press the Control key and the s key at the same time.”. In fact it means “Press the s key while holding the Control key.”

I’ve seen users carefully, and uselessly, try to press the Control and “s” keys simultaneously — and if they happen to hit “s” first, they get an ‘s’ rather than . The current description suggests that timing matters. It doesn’t.

Also, the current description doesn’t let you know that if you need to type followed by , you can: Press the Control key; press and release ‘a’; press and release ‘b’; release the Control key.

In the Mobi version, an images of windows is expected but instead, a image about the autocompletion is shown.

The PDF version does not have this problem.

This is probably not a “Technical Error”, though in my config `:set path+=app/` and `find Mai` does nothing (no substitution happen, etc).
macOS 10.11.6 + Vim 7.4.1967.

In my setup `vim .` does not open parent directory by pressing “-” key. Though `:Explore` does.

In my setup <C-^> only switches from file buffer to directory tree but not other way around.

Page number 38 is missing….

The directory ……/code/cmdline_mode does not contain
history-scrollers.vim, so the result of
$ ls *.vim
should be batch.vim only.

$ cd code/file/mvc should be $ cd code/files/mvc

Last paragraph, ga outputs the numeric code of the character in octal as well (text mentions only decimal and hexadecimal).

\\3,\\2\\,1
should be
\\3,\\2,\\1

Last paragraph:
[…] But first, we’ll reduce the
spacing between the two columns, which are farther apart than they need
be.

The word to is missing: […] than they need TO be

last paragraph: If n is ommited, it defaults to 1.

shouldn’t it be … it defaults to 0 ?

The “Two for the Price of One” box says that the compoud command equivalent to ^{C, but it seems that the two commands are not the same.} moves the cursor to the first non-whitespace character, whereas the behavior of S does not respect leading whitespace on the line.

Vim help text :h S says that the S command is a synonym for cc, which kills the whole line (including leading whitespace) and then leaves you in insert mode. The closest equivalent for S in longhand I can think of is 0C.

Hope this helps, and thanks for a well-written text on a very powerful editor. I first learned Emacs, but thanks to your book I’m training to make the switch :)

Max

The lavender box titled Autocompletion and Case Sensitivity it says:
“In the “She sells sea shells” example above,"

However, in my layout of the book, the referenced example is below the lavender box.

In box titled “Two for the Price of One”: O (capital letter o) replaces ko instead of 0 (zero)

The link in the footnote points to a porn site. I assume from context that this was originally a website for looking up collective nouns, however, it appears to have been cybersquatted.

Nodelint is deprecated and will not run in a modern setup.

The source code address for the second edition is “pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/source_code.”

I’m calling this a suggestion, because I think it’s misleading but not truly an error.

The text says “This file contains only five lines. If we wanted to jump to the end of the file, we could enter :5 or we could use the special $ symbol.” But this isn’t quite true. The file has thirteen lines, but most are comments. (Only five are not comments.) Most importantly “:5” and “:$” are not equivalent here.

I assume that most people will quickly figure it all out (or not even notice), but someone very new to programming or HTML may not understand.