I started having trouble with vim crashing for me. I’m on OSX with homebrew and rbenv, and it crashed when editing Ruby files. I would get a segmentation fault.

After some googling which was not particularly fruitful, the solution I came up with was:

• switch to the system ruby rbenv shell system
• uninstall vim completely with homebrew brew uninstall vim
• reinstall vim from head brew install --HEAD --override-system-vi vim

This seems to have fixed the problem, though I do not know if it was switching to the system ruby or installing from head. This may require extra study which I do not have time to do now.

In vim a useful command is the :Explore, which opens the netrw browser at the location of the current file. This is especially handy for editing files over ssh, but is handy for those who don’t like the file tree type plugins.

The command can be shortened to :E which is fantastic, quickly browse the file system inside vim.

Just today thanks to this answer on SO, I realised that vim can automatically pipe text through a shell command. Just think about that for a second For a simple example you can write python code into a text file, and execute it which replaces the code with the result.

for i in xrange(10):
    print i

Selecting this text with in visual mode (you should all know how to do this) and typing