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.

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