vim

When Bram Moolenaar created vim in 1991, he made a foundation for one of the best editing experiences in the world. Vim is a highly customizable editor, especially used and loved by developers.

.vimrc

The .vimrc is the config file for vim. You can add a own .vimrc in your home folder. There are some settings, which are more or less helpful.

set number

This command shows line numbers for every buffer.

syntax on

Depending on the file extension or file type, the syntax is highlighted if possible. This option is very use full for coding, and works for several languages.

set autoindent

When this option is enabled, every time you hit <enter> in edit mode, you get the same indention as the line above. This is quite useful, when you’re writing code blocks, especially when you’re coding in a language with indention as a semantic meaning like python.

plugins

One of the common plugin managers for Vim is called Vundle, which is short for Vim bundle. It helps tracking plugin changes and offers convenience functions for adding, updating and deleting bundles.

A minimal .vimrc integration looks like

set nocompatible
filetype off   

set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#begin()

Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'

" add plugins here 

call vundle#end()
filetype plugin indent on

After adding a plugin to the .vimrc and a reload, you can call BundleInstall to install the new plugins.

syntastic

When you write code with vim, syntastic is one of the most helping plugins. It offers syntax checking for several languages.

Plugin 'scrooloose/syntastic'

CtrlP

When you have deeply nested project folder, CtrlP helps you finding the right file using fuzzy logic. It is quite fast, and completely written in vim script.

https://github.com/ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim

delimitMate

When you write code, you often open and close quotes, parenthesis and brackets. delimitMate helps you closing these, if necessary, but you can write the closing part if you like.

Plugin 'Raimondi/delimitMate'

vim-airline

vim-airline gives you a quit fast status- and tab line.

Plugin 'bling/vim-airline'

misc

This are some vim hints, which are helpful from time to time.

pretty print xml on a windows machine

If you want to pretty print a xml file on a windows machine, you need a running version of libxml. Therefore you need the following files from the libxml project downloads.

• libXml
• iConv
• zLib

The binary folders should be added to the system path, so xmllint.exe is accessible from command line.

If you want to pretty print a xml in a open buffer you can execute

:% !xmllint.exe "%" --format

The current open buffer is replaced with the result of xmllint.exe.

ctags

You can tag your sources using ctags. This is a very helpful tool, when you are working on huge codebases.

First of all you have to build up the tag file in the root of your application with

ctags -R .

After starting vim you can use

:tag whatever

to search your application and browse to the occurrences with

:ts

ctags is very helpful in combination with CtrlP.

:CtrlPTag

will use the generated tags file for navigation through the sources. For further reading Andrew Stewards blog post will give you more information.