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I like to write tutorials and articles for a programming forum I frequent. This forum has a character limit per post. I've used Notepad++ in the past to write posts and it keeps a live character count in the status bar. I'm starting to use gVim more and I really don't want to go back to Notepad++ at this point, but it is very useful to have this character count. If I go over the count, I usually end up pasting the post into Notepad++ so I can see when I've trimmed enough to get by the limit.
I've seen suggestions that :set ruler
would help, but this only gives the character count via the current column index on the current line. This would be great if I didn't use paragraph breaks, but I'm sure you'd agree that reading several thousand characters in one paragraph is not comfortable.
I read the help and thought that rulerformat
would work, but after looking over the statusline
format it uses I didn't see anything that gives a character count for the current buffer.
I've seen that there are plugins that add this, but I'm still dipping my toes into gVim and I'm not sure I want to load random plugins before I understand what they do. I'd prefer to use something built in to vim, but if it doesn't exist it doesn't exist.
What should I do to accomplish my goal? If it involves a plugin, do you use it and how well does it work?
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g CTRL-G
I didn't know this existed. Nice! – Jason Down – 2012-06-13T18:50:24.430Nice I keep forgetting to use !bang commands in Vim – Eddie B – 2013-01-16T01:38:47.237
3g <c-g> works cross-platform which is nice. – AndrewPK – 2014-01-17T18:39:24.187
Where can I find more info about the use of
! [...] %
? – Wok – 2014-02-14T20:59:35.537Help is here: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/various.html#:%21cmd . If you make heavy use of shell commands, check also this plugin: http://stevelosh.com/projects/clam/ .
– mrucci – 2014-02-15T08:10:12.297