My full-time job is to implement Health Level Seven (HL7) interfaces. HL7 is a character delimited text standard for interfacing data between Health care applications. So, I have to deal with text on a daily basis. This interaction with delimited text starts to take even more time when we get closer to moving interfaces to a production environment because you have to analyze thousands of messages and possibly change a few things around in each. This analysis and manipulation is what I have been doing most of the last week and looking back now I can say that vim has saved me lots and lots of time. I love the vglobal, global and normal commands. What prompted this post was that I was looking for a way to highlight the line that the cursor was on and after a google search I found out the “cursorline” option, which does exactly what I was looking for. I believe this was implemented in vim 7, so if you have vim (or gvim) 7.0 or higher then try it out: “set cursorline”

Overall, I am so glad that I had spent time in the past experimenting with perl, awk, grep and wc. These four commands and vim have been invaluable to me. I would suggest playing around with these five tools (well, perl is a language) if your job involves working with text. Also, make sure to learn regular expressions because regular expressions are what will take you to the next level! 🙂

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