Scripting the Vim editor, Part 1 (by Damian Conway)

This is a really great set of articles, top notch overview along with practical advice on idiomatic VimScript and examples that you're not likely to find anywhere else. I find something new almost every time I refer back to these. Just now in scanning through the article on Vim dictionaries I noticed the section on using dictionaries to pass optional arguments. I hadn't written much code using optional arguments last time I read it and probably didn't even notice this section. But lately I've been using optional arguments, wasted time dealing with exactly the problems the author points out, and see the appropriateness of his advice to use dictionaries to pass optional args. This is one example among several where these articles provide excellent advice about good coding practices in VimScript that I haven't seen anywhere else.

There's a recent post about scripting in Vim using Ruby, but as one commenter says there, it's more portable to use Vimscript itself. I don't do a lot of Vimscripting, but I found this tutorial helpful. Here are the other links as well:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-vim-script...

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-vim-script...

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-vim-script...

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-vim-script...