Vim Sensei

Make Vim discoverable!

What?

This is not a Vim plugin.

This is a work in progress solution for analyzing your Vim usage patterns. It consists of three parts:

• commands to enable logging in Vim
• a script to convert the logs to a particular format
• and the Jupyter Notebook with useful code snippets to analyze the log

Neovim Support

Neovim is not yet supported. There is no ch_logfile function in Neovim and I did not research if there is an alternative. If you find it let me know or make a Pull Request.

How?

Enable logging in Vim

NOTE: this may take a considerable amount of space (on the order of GB/month). Keep an eye on these files.

Put this snippet in your vimrc:

" Log to analyze user behaviour
augroup VimSensei
autocmd VimEnter * call ch_logfile($HOME . "/.vim/log-" . strftime('%s'))
autocmd InsertEnter * call ch_log("::Entering Insert Mode::")
autocmd InsertLeave * call ch_log("::Leaving Insert Mode::")
autocmd CmdwinEnter * call ch_log("::Entering command-line window::")
autocmd CmdwinLeave * call ch_log("::Leaving command-line window::")
autocmd CmdlineEnter * call ch_log("::Entering command-line mode::")
autocmd CmdlineLeave * call ch_log("::Leaving command-line mode::")
augroup END

Convert logs into a list of tokens

$ python scripts/process-vim-log.py ~/.vim/log-* > vim.log

Use Jupyter Notebook to analyze the log

Installing Jupyter

Jupyter - ArchWiki

Warning

The resulting log file may contain sensitive information due to imperfect filtering of insert methods! Do not share your log file with untrusted parties!

Use scripts/find-words.py to detect some english words in your log.

What to do about it?

Here are some resources to help you find better solutions. Help links are clickable.

• First of all, the User Manual. Access inside Vim with :h user-manual. This is not just a help reference, it is a readable chapter-by-chapter guide. It will take you to another level.

• Using Neovim floating window to break bad habits. This can be adapted for Vim, using :h popup-window. You can see an example in my plugin Vim Ostroga.