Vim

I'm a huge fan of Vim, particularly NeoVim.

The editor vi was created in 1976 by Bill Joy (wikipedia). It's both incredibly powerful and agonizingly counter-intuitive. It remains in widespread use and still under development today, mostly in the form of Vim and NeoVim. It's painful to learn, but once you have it's a fantastic editor.

I started using Vi around 1997 - shortly after I started using Linux and administering Unix systems (not just Linux). I was deep in my evangelism phase in 2016, when I presented about Vim at LinuxCon (2016-08, 50 minutes). These days, I just use it because I know it's the best text editor in the world and I'm less concerned that others know it.

An essential learning resource about VimScript, the language you can reprogram the editor in: Learn Vimscript the Hard Way - I encourage you to buy a book copy, but you can read it all online too.

I've also posted to my blog about it several times.

Functions

I have date formats I use a lot, the commonest being:

     3 December 2014
     ---------------

I created an insert mode abbreviation for that, ,d. Here's the function. Copy it into your vimrc if it's useful to you.