Purpose:
Maintain a set of notes related to current projects, current software systems, and other handy information that is needed quickly can be valuable. Using vi/gvim to do this can improve the navigation of the notes files.
Advantages:
- VIM / GVIM are free easy to learn editors.
- VIM / GVIM exist on almost all unix installs by default.
- Use of 'tags' allows quick hyper-link style navigation though a file or set of files.
- Very light weight and simple way of maintaining information.
What are tags?
Tags are bookmarks. There are two sides to the tag:
- The hyper-link or menu identifier. Called the identifier tag.
- The bookmarked location or tagged data.
within vim/gvim, one moves from a hyper-link or menu identifier to the tagged data or bookmark location by placing the cursor over the menu item, and pressing 'crtl-]'.
One can quickly jump back to the previous location (the hyper-link or menu identifier from which they came) by pressing the 'crtl-T'.
How do you create bookmarks, and bookmark locations?
- Creating a bookmark or tag:
- Use the |tagname| syntax to create a menu item or hyper-link in a text file.
- In the tags file associated with this text file create a single line entry as follows:
tagname filename.txt /*tagname* - The tags listed within the tag file will have to be sorted or the tag logic/hyper-link will not work.
- Tagging the location/setting the bookmark:
- within the text file, add a bookmark with the syntax *tagname*
- You are free to use the same tagname in multiple bookmarks, so for example if you wanted to use the tag with a name section at the beginning of each section, you could.
- You are also free to use multiple tags/bookmarks on a single line. An example would be to include the following tags *section* *howtotags* *gvim_tags*.
