In my work as a BEA Tech Support engineer, I have to spend a lot of time dealing with XML content. In the past I tried to grep through the files, but had found that element order and random newlines make it quite hard. I have since found a solution. Everybody who works with XML probably knows that XSLT/XPATH is supposed to be a good way to manipulate XML files. Unfortunately, XSLT is very verbose and sometimes quite obscure, especially when it comes to plain text output.

One’s first post should be interesting. And what could make a techie’s post more interesting then the Vi vs. Emacs battle. So in my very first post allow me to declare my allegiance to Vi. Or to be more specific Vim. But it would not be interesting to just announce my preferences and be done with that. Let me instead explain a little what I like in Vim and what I have done to it in making it useful for me.