Big list of files to edit? vim to the rescue (again)

Did you know that you can treat the text under the cursor as a filename, and open that up for editing right in vim? Here's how:

• gf will open the filename under the cursor in the current window
• ^Wf will open it in a split window
• ^Wgf will open it in a new window

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Vim gem: built-in calculation

Vim is my go-to editor. Has been for 20 years. Besides being an all-around awesome editor for composing text, it also has some handy built-ins, like calculations:

• In insert mode, ^R= accepts a mathematical expression, the result of which will be inserted in place.
• In normal mode, ^A increments the number at (or to the right of) the cursor by one, while ^X decrements it by one. These accept repeats, so 5^A will add 5 to the number.

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Using vim to replace string functions with their multi-byte equivalent

The PHP INI option mbstring.func_overload override certain string functions (like strpos, substr, etc.) with multi-byte aware implementations. This makes it super easy to migrate a legacy code base to UTF-8, but immediately restricts interaction with vendor products (Symfony, Net_DNS2, etc.).

The proper integration is to manually replace string functions with their multi-byte equivalent. In one legacy code base I'm improving, there are on the order of 10k instances of these functions. I want to change and verify each replacement, but I don't want to type much. Time for some vim-fu:

:argdo %s/strpos/mb_strpos/gc | wn

This performs a confirmed find and replace, writes the change to disk, then moves on to the next file.

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