NetRW and MacVim

So since I upgraded to snow leopard I could have sworn that the netrw just stopped working. Every time I tried:

:e scp://somhost/somepath/file.txt

I would get some gobbly gook about not knowing how to handle a BufEnter event or some such thing with regard to "scp://".

I'm using Snapshot 50 since that works better than the last stable build (I recall some repainting issues). Well, it looks like maybe the snapshot doesn't include the netrw plugin. So I just downloaded it and installed it manually and all is good with the world, yeah!

:e ~/Downloads/netrw.vba.gz
:so %

YouTRACK: a bug tracker for the vim-ish?

I got an email yesterday from jetbrains, notifying me that their internal bugtracker YouTRACK has gone beta. "Try it out!", they tell me. Okay, I like jetbrains stuff, so I bit. I'm posting here about it because it kind of reminds me of my learning process with VIM. Back when I first started using VIM I remember that I suffered through the initial arcana: I couldn't do anything at first (it was hard), then I began to cotton on to the general concept (but I couldn't really do it), at last I could do things fast, and finally I wondered why it didn't have all those kitchen sink features other products have. Doesn't this sound sooo reminicent of using VIM?

If you have ever used VIM you probably remember struggling just to frickin...TYPE. Type anything at all. And then once you could actually do that, well - what about saving and exiting? Escape? :wq? Ahh...those first few baby steps. YouTrack totally hit me like that. Of course they provide GUI menus for everything but me being a VIMish user, I wasn't interested in the easy/slow way. I had to figure out how to do everything by hot-key only. After all, the speed what supposedly sets this bugtracker apart. The installation part was easy. Download the WAR, stick it in tomcat, and fire it up. Bam. Its up and running. Copy and paste the demo license from their website and I'm good to go until December 2nd (after which point I'll have to buy a commercial license if I actually like the thing? How much?? Who knows...we'll see).

I setup a couple small projects I'm currently working on (too small for a bug tracker - or rather, too small to be worth the trouble). First impression: interesting. There is a search window with type-ahead keywords that appear as you go. How do I make a new bug? Ah. A hotkey (and by mouse of course, but I'm ignoring that as I said).

I easily entered a couple bugs and a couple projects in the system. I'm working on a project and I want to pull up all the bugs, how do I do that? It takes me a couple minutes stumbling around with the search window to figure out what the syntax is "project: AA" - ahh...tab completion. Nice. So there were are - a couple bugs. How do I get from searching to modifying bugs? Durn durn durn I stumble on this for 20 minutes.

Ahah! ESCAPE! Of course. Wouldn't you know it would be the same key that is such a stumbling block in VIM too. Go figure. Once I figure that out, oh my god. Its the frickin easiest thing to add comments and tag bugs. A breeze. Very snappy. I'm loving that. I can now see myself setting up projects and adding bugs for trivial little projects in no time. Nice. Perhaps even todo lists in general. Quick modification of tab names, batch updates, etc. Power.

Of course, now that I'm enlightened, I have questions. Lots of questions. Kitchen sink type questions. Can I use external java/javascript to make mashups (say burn down charts, remotely add bugs say via my own applications, etc). Whats the best practice for agile delevelopment say? Integrate with other back end bug trackers like bugzilla or trac? As I keep playing with it over the next few weeks I'm sure I'll have more questions and comments. But so far I like it a lot. Just wish I knew what I'm gonna have to pay for the thing once they go commercial with it a few months down the road (ie, once I'm totally addicted).

Daniel in Nowhere: Put Searched results into a split window under VIM

Hey this looks pretty cool - every now and then I've wanted to see search results in a nice searchable list. Gonna have to try this plugin out:

Daniel in Nowhere: Put Searched results into a split window under VIM

Registers

There is always something new to discover out there, particularly with Vim. I thought I knew how registers worked: you got your window manager registers (+ and *); the 'last thing I deleted' register ("); the confusing 'last 10 deletes' registers (0-9); some read only registers that I don't consider to be registers because, hey, you can't write to them (% and #); and then the multipurpose named registers (a-z).

I've programmed myself over the years to use specific letters for specific purposes. The 'n' and 'm' registers are reserved for recorded macros (yes, macros are saved in registers - handy to know if you want to save a macro in your .vimrc for later use, say), the 'iou' I tend to use for registers that are used in a macro, and 'fvc' for yanking and storing.

For instance, if the lines below existed, and I wanted to copy the first one for later use:

every good boy
does good

I'd do: "fyy

Now, if you type ":registers" you can see all of your registers, and thats overwhelming. I tend to just look at the register I'm especially intersted in ":echo @f" or ":registers f" does the trick nicely. Also, since I know I use the 'fvc' registers for yanking - I tend to just look in those registers if I forget what I've done with ":reg fvc".

Did you know that you can append to the named registers? I had NO IDEA. By using the capital letter 'F' instead of the lowercase letter 'f', for instance, you append rather than replace. Take the example above. Say that I was going along editing and I saw another line I might want to use later:

...
...
blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.
...
...

I could, if I wanted, just add it to register 'f' with the other line by doing: "Fyy

Type ":reg f" and you see:

--- Registers ---
"f Every good boy^JColors dazzle insect wings.^J


Not too pretty, but thats where this comes in handy: ":echo @f"

Every good boy
Colors dazzle insect wings

Press ENTER or type command to continue

There you are - a case for using 'echo' over 'register' and an interesting note about the named registers.

Another one trying to come back to vim. I sense a theme.

Just saw this post today, about another person trying out switching from TextMate back to their first love: VIM. He switched back to TextMate, and I can understand his reasons. Plugins in Vim do tend to feel 'bolted on', and they can be kinda slow. Although you can certainly customize Vim so that it fits your work requirements, many times I think we all have to customize it for our own needs because, out of the box, its not doing what we need.

This makes me think of cream, a distribution of Vim customized for non-Vim users, in the mode of word processing.

We need some other distribution out there that tightly integrates some of the really amazing plugins that are out there. A cream-for-programmers who know the power of TextMate, IntelliJ, etc.

One thing that might make also go into this soup...has anyone out there noticed the 'netbeans' extension to vim? I've seen the switch and read about what it was supposed to do - tightly integrate Vim on top of netbeans...so you can harness the power of netbeans inside Vim. Fancy icons in the gutters, cool refactoring features of netbeans in Vim. I'm only guessing here, but thats what I *think* the netbeans integration was supposed to have provided. There are certain automagical properties of the big battleship IDEs that Vim just isn't meant to provide...but perhaps providing a way to interface with them would bring those 'other IDE' users back into the fold.

Eh...I don't know. Personally, a kickass tightly integrated distribution of vim with existing plugins would make me happy ... the IDE integration really seems like overkill. But...who knows.

file lookups

I've been hearing about this post from a TextMate guy (I'll call him TM1) finally coming home to Vim(hey, if you're gonna link to some other random editor, you GOTTA plug your own!). Good good. In fact, from any command line editor's point of view: amazing. Its funny though because THIS TextMate guy (call him TM2) got me to write up a plugin very similar to TM1s.

Before I go any further - just click on the 'this post' link above and watch the short movie the guy recorded. I'm lazy, I'm not going to make a video. Once you've watched the video you'll understand what we're talking about: an gosh-its-almost-like-its-an-IDE friendly way of finding files in your project.

Its the kind of thing that just has to be there for any programmer under 35 - we're just not going to fall in love with the :find and :grep and :vimgrep commands of the previous generation. Its just not easy enough. For some people the project plugin does the job. I admit, I kinda like it myself...but I always missed the easy file lookups you get in Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc etc etc. Being a Java guy mainly, I really love how easy Intellij makes it.

When TM2 expressed interested in making the final journey from emacs->textmate->vim, you better believe I was there to encourage him. When he complained that there just wasn't any good Command-T equivelant in Vim, you bet I looked around. I found the lookupfile plugin. At the time this was version 1.4 of the plugin - it was slow, it didn't do camel case searches (fuzzy finder doesn't do that either !?), you couldn't search inside files (ala grep).

I extended the plugin with my own version and tried to get TM2 to use it. Unfortunately my skillz aren't quite what they could be in vimscript. However I was able to get the following working (and hey, it still works!):

• I implemented searching using the standard unixy textutils and findutils packages underneath (find, sed, grep, xargs, etc). The first search is still slow b/c it builds up the search terms, but then they stay cached...so subsequent searches are blindingly fast.
  
• Compatibility with &path and &suffixesadd settings (the variables used by :find, :grep, etc). Basically you can setup &path/&suffixesadd and use :find, :grep, and your friendly lookupfile functions all interoperably. I setup mappings where I only searched say...java files; or java, xml and properties files; or ruby and xml and yaml. Complete control over which directories you search under, as well as their extensions.
• Support for case sensitive or non case sensitivity.
  
• Camel Case search. Not only can you do 'c*frog' to find 'CamelFrogMasterFactory.java' (or with case sensitivity 'C*Fro'), but you can do 'CFro' as well (a * is implied after each capital letter).
• Grep search: same way of searching (nice filtering list) but search the file contents as well. If it worked better, I'd maybe win that $100 bounty :).

But I had a problem - those darned findutils and textutils I built everything on aren't standard on OSX and so my TM2 friend had no end of trouble. It just was buggy. I guess it still is, but...

since somone else has published their version, and I found it hella slow, I figure...hell, here's my effort as well. Maybe someone out there would like to pick up where I left off.

You can find the result of my efforts right over here. Now.To work.

MacVIM and cd

Just a quick note. For you Mac & Vim users out there - MACVIM. It truly rocks.

Also, a quick "oh my gosh I'm so glad I finally found a command for this," and then a "doh, of course!"

I often launch Vim and then have to work on a set of files in some specific project directly. Its a pain to have to type something like:

:e ~/Documents/ProjectA/subProjectX/file1.py
:sp ~/Documents/ProjectA/subProjectX/file2.py
:sp ~/Documents/ProjectA/subProjectX/file3.py

over and over and over again. I've been looking for the command to set your 'current directory', and I found it: cd. Duh:

:cd ~/Documents/ProjectA/subProjectX
:e file1.py
:sp file2.py
:sp file3.py

So much better.