GUI Customization: Toolbars, Scrollbars, Mouse, and Clipboard

used actions. Hopefully the icons are self-explanatory. There are tooltips to get an extra hint (move the mouse pointer to the icon without clicking and don't move it for a second). The "Edit/Global Settings/Toggle Toolbar" menu item can be used to make the toolbar disappear. If you never want a toolbar, use this command in your vimrc file: > :set guioptions-=T This removes the 'T' flag from the 'guioptions' option. Other parts of the GUI can also be enabled or disabled with this option. See the help for it. THE SCROLLBARS By default there is one scrollbar on the right. It does the obvious thing. When you split the window, each window will get its own scrollbar. You can make a horizontal scrollbar appear with the menu item Edit/Global Settings/Toggle Bottom Scrollbar. This is useful in diff mode, or when the 'wrap' option has been reset (more about that later). When there are vertically split windows, only the windows on the right side will have a scrollbar. However, when you move the cursor to a window on the left, it will be this one that the scrollbar controls. This takes a bit of time to get used to. When you work with vertically split windows, consider adding a scrollbar on the left. This can be done with a menu item, or with the 'guioptions' option: > :set guioptions+=l This adds the 'l' flag to 'guioptions'. ============================================================================== *09.2* Using the mouse Standards are wonderful. In Microsoft Windows, you can use the mouse to select text in a standard manner. The X Window system also has a standard system for using the mouse. Unfortunately, these two standards are not the same. Fortunately, you can customize Vim. The following commands makes the mouse work more like a Microsoft Windows mouse: > set selection=exclusive set selectmode=mouse,key set keymodel=startsel,stopsel The mouse can be further tuned. Check out these options if you want to change the way how the mouse works: 'mouse' in which mode the mouse is used by Vim 'mousemodel' what effect a mouse click has 'mousetime' time between clicks for a double-click 'mousehide' hide the mouse while typing 'selectmode' whether the mouse starts Visual or Select mode ============================================================================== *09.3* The clipboard In section |04.7| the basic use of the clipboard was explained. There is one essential thing to explain about X-windows: There are actually two places to exchange text between programs. MS-Windows doesn't have this. In X-Windows there is the "current selection". This is the text that is currently highlighted. In Vim this is the Visual area (this assumes you are using the default option settings). You can paste this selection in another application without any further action. For example, in this text select a few words with the mouse. Vim will switch to Visual mode and highlight the text. Now start another gvim, without a file name argument, so that it displays an empty window. Click the middle mouse button. The selected text will be inserted. The "current selection" will only remain valid until some other text is selected. After doing the paste in the other gvim, now select some characters in that window. You will notice that the words that were previously selected in the other gvim window are displayed differently. This means that it no longer is the current selection. You don't need to select text with the mouse, using the keyboard commands for Visual mode works just as well. THE REAL CLIPBOARD Now for the other place with which text can be exchanged. We call this the

This section covers how to customize the GUI in gVim, including hiding/showing the toolbar and scrollbars. It then explains mouse usage, adapting it to different standards like MS-Windows, and tuning mouse-related options. Finally, it discusses the clipboard, specifically how X-Windows handles text exchange through 'current selection' and the 'real clipboard'.