First Post With Vim
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hacking away on scripts to customize Vim, replicating the scripts I made for jEdit. I’m more or less done, and this blog post is being written in MacVim. This hopefully means that when I’m done with it I’ll be able to publish it from within Vim, the same as with jEdit.
Writing scripts for Vim has been rather different from writing them for jEdit. jEdit is an editor with a robust API; Vim is an editor that kind of gives the user access to the API all the time, via keyboard commands, and scripting for it often consists of simply passing keystrokes. As an example, this is the Jython code for getting the current selection in a jEdit macro:
text = init.textArea.getSelectedText()
This is the Python for getting the current visual selection in Vim:
self.vim.command('normal gv"wygv')
self.vim.command("let tvar = getreg(’t’)")
text = unicode(self.vim.eval("tvar"), "utf-8")
From a programming perspective, jEdit is clearly a lot nicer to deal with.
I have two primary reasons for making the switch:
- Future proofing: I couldn’t switch to the various pre-release versions of jEdit 4.3 because I couldn’t get my Jython scripts to work with them, and that made me worry that there simply weren’t enough people scripting jEdit in Python to make it likely that the plugin allowing Jython macros would be supported. Given how useful my scripts are, that would have trapped me with jEdit 4.2, or some future version, if support for JythonInterpreter flagged. Vim, on the other hand, seems to have a lot of people scripting for it in Python, and I don’t see Python support simply disappearing anytime soon with a new release.
- Power/speed: I’m someone who’s quite inclined towards keyboard shortcuts in all applications, and this means Vim should be a highly efficient environment.
- Mentality: Related to the previous point, I think that being able to manipulate text more powerfully will reinforce the approach of scripting as many steps as possible, rather than doing them (no matter how efficiently) manually. Even over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to write scripts than to put up with various manual steps in my daily workflow.
So far I’ve mainly worked to replicate my jEdit setup in Vim, with a few small improvements here and there; the largest one is probably the live word count, which means that I can glance at the status line to see the current word count instead of having to select the text to be counted and then invoke the word counter. I’ve also tweaked it so it only counts the relevant parts of the document—for example, in this blog post, it doesn’t count the title or the datestamp.
I don’t intend to abandon jEdit, and have a feeling that I’ll use it for various things here and there, but I’ve switched over the Vim for the majority of my writing and programming.
09 Mar 2010 at 13:24
First comment! With vim via vimperator. I know you’ve been into Chrome lately, but FireFox + vimperator + Ctrl-I in a form field to give you a vim buffer to edit its contents is pretty nice.