Nov 6 2009 vim

Messing around with vim

So I’ve been playing around with vim to try to better my usage of the text editor and have found some very interesting features / plugins and one annoying pitfall which I want to share.

To start of, I’m no longer using the standard vim app, but rather gvim as I’ve been looking for better mouse support for a while. I’ve no need of the toolbar (I like keeping the menus around), and removing it is as simple as adding the following to your ~/.vimrc:

set guioptions-=T

Using tabs is nice with the gui (albiet also present w/ the regular text version), you can create a new one with :tabnew and scroll through them with :tabp<CR> and :tabn<CR> also <alt>+<pg up/down> works for scrolling in gvim.

I’ve installed the showmarks plugin which is useful for visualizing the line / column markers you have set in the file you are editing. I’ve just also found the project plugin which I now wonder how I’ve even lived without it (at one point I was considering writing a standalone app just to do what this plugin does) and makes configuring projects and files like you would in an IDE a cinch (I very much recommend trying it if you use vim, it takes less than an hour to learn / completely setup).

Unfortunately one relatively new feature I wanted to try doesn’t work just right in the vim version that currently ships with Fedora. Omni-completion is a very powerful feature of vim that uses ctags to provide code-completion and other functionality to users editing documents. While it comes built in for a wide variety of languages, the Fedora vim version isn’t built with the necessary flags for ruby support and thus auto-completion doesn’t currently work.

If you don’t mind building it yourself you can simply follow the following steps:

• yum remove vim-common
• yum install rpm-build ruby ruby-devel “perl(ExtUtils::Embed)” libacl-devel gpm-devel libXpm-devel wget # there might be other dependencies, if subsequent steps complain about things missing try to yum install them
• wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/source/SRPMS/vim-7.2.245-3.fc12.src.rpm
• Add the following line to your .rpmmacros “ %topdir ~/rpmbuild”
• rpmbuild –rebuild vim-7.2.245-3.fc12.src.rpm
• sudo yum localinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x8664/vim-common-7.2.245-3.fc11.x8664.rpm ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x8664/vim-enhanced-7.2.245-3.fc11.x8664.rpm ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x8664/vim-X11-7.2.245-3.fc11.x86_64.rpm –nogpgcheck

Now vim / gvim will be installed on your system with ruby omni-completion support.