Sorry in advance for the newbie question. I've been trying to use vim for keeping a personal wiki, but I can't quite seem to decide on a good plugin. Vimwiki is great, and I really like the way it does checkboxes and uses the enter key to follow links. Notes.vim is simpler but I like it a lot better: it dynamically makes names of notes into links like Tomboy Notes, makes pretty bullet points, and has a search function built in. I can't get vimwiki to use files with no extension, but notes.vim does that automatically.
What I want to know is: is there an easy way (calling a vimscript file or something?) to combine some features of both of these plugins? I've tried doing some cutting-and-pasting but so far nothing has been working.
I doubt whether tbere is any simple automated way to do it. Both Vimwiki and notes.vim are "filetype" plugins. Generally in Vim any file (or buffer) can be set to just a single filetype.
It would depend on how the ftplugins were written, but it may be possible to apply them both to same buffer by making sure that the buffer is set to both filetypes, sequentially. That is, the buffer can be set to one filetype at a time, but setting it to both one after the other may do part of what you need.
For example, opening a notes.vim file will automatically set the buffer to a notes.vim filetype. Once open you could issue the command :setlocal filetype=vimwiki to change it to a vimwiki buffer. If vimwiki filetype initialization doesn't wipe out crucial notes.vim settings or have conflicting operation then you may then be able to access some functionality from both ftplugins. Not likely to get you very far, but maybe worth a try. Better would be to combine sections of their code into a single ftplugin.
Related
I installed Latex-Suite for Vim, and I like it very much, but I'd like to be able to customize the environment mappings that came by default, and add new ones. For example I want to edit the equation environment that appears typing EEQ and move around some elements, like the \label{} command. How can I do this? I've been scanning everything inside my /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/ftplugin but I can't find a way to do it (or I just don't understand what those files are).
You want to check out the documentation on Macro Customisation, specifically the Tex_Env_{name} bit.
In short, if you want your theorem snippet to look like
\begin{theorem}
<++>
\end{theorem}<++>
then you want a line like
let g:Tex_Env_theorem = "\\begin{theorem}\<CR><++>\<CR>\\end{theorem}"
in your vimrc.
Note the backslashes to escape carriage-return, and double-backslash for normal backslashes.
The <F5> functionality (press F5 after typing an environment name, i.e. figure<F5>) should work out of the box, but you may need to refresh the three-letter code. This is more hassle than it needs to be, but something like
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.tex call IMAP('EFI', g:Tex_Env_figure,'tex')
will do the job.
The answer to the question you asked comes with a caveat, which is that Latex-Suite is an enormous amount of code that is very hard and annoying to modify, and which does not play nicely with other plugins. This falls into Latex-Suite's philosophy that it's the only plugin you need for editing latex within vim.
That said, you want to look in /path/to/ftplugin/latex-suite/envmacros.vim. Searching for EEQ will lead you on the path to understanding the set of calls that latex-suite performs. I would like to reiterate that many functions are deeply intertwined.
On the other hand, there is a very easy way to have very easily customizable environments, which are snippets. See the UltiSnips page for a good example of how this works. These are designed for customization and extremely easy to write.
Vim is a nice editor and I use it for many tasks.
However, when it comes to start working on a new (possibly huge) codebase, I don't feel comfortable using it to go around the code with the objective of understanding how things work.
For example, if I want to see where a C++ function is used, I can :vimgrep for that function in every **/*.cpp files and :copen the quickfix window to jump on every occurrence... of that string.
If I do the same with e.g. Eclipse (call hierarchy of a C++ method), that will not be just a string, but a C++ method defined in an object, so I will get a precise indication of the usages of that function (and not also a function with the same name defined in another class).
So the question is, how to make vim a powerful tool to analyze code?
Subquestions:
Are there any vim plugins designed for this?
Does it make sense to use vim to only analyze code? Probably external tools (e.g.: OpenGrok) can do the job?
Vim is a text editor. What you want is almost completely orthogonal to editing text and completely outside of Vim's own abilities.
However, Vim is quite good at using external tools like ctags and cscope for navigating within a project. Supposing you have created a tags file and/or a cscope.out database, Vim has a bunch of commands you can use to "jump to definition", "jump to usage", etc.: :ts[elect] foo, <C-]> over a function name and so on… You can find all the info you need in :h ctags and :h cscope.
If you are curious, GNU GLOBAL is another alternative. Another pro of cscope is that it comes with its own TUI that you can use in your shell.
The only plugin offering a cscope (+ ctags) interface I know of is CCTree which seems to be limited to C.
There are a bunch of ctags oriented plugins like TagBar or TagList you could try but note that, while ctags is limited to definitions, cscope can also do usage and callers.
You should keep in mind that these tools are code indexers: you shouldn't expect them to "understand" your code or be even remotely as precise as IDE tools. However I love Vim, I'd suggest you use a tool better suited to that task than a text editor.
When I switched from Netbeans to Vim, I felt the same as you. I missed Netbeans feature to see any function definition upon a right click. Disclaimer: I use Ruby, Javascript mainly and sometimes PHP
I tried ctags, but found it is not so accurate and not so clean. I also tried plugins Tagbar and Taglist using together with ctags. Tagbar is a bit heavy in my opinion, takes lot of CPU and memory when handling tags. Taglist is better, but the best use case is to browse long files instead of tags.
Finally I gave up using ctags.
Later I found there are better solutions specific to language. For example, for Ruby there is a plugin to show ri doc of any function within installed gems(libs), with only one key.
But I still don't use that often as my habit already changed. I like things to be lean, to be in there right places, and to be fast.
Now I feel comfortable by:
Using tmux together with Vim. Check doc and verify code in console when needed.
Use snippet plugin(Neosnippet) to store frequently used codes, methods. The snippets management in Vim is far better and flexible than any IDE I've seen.
Use brain to store more, with less touching of mouse.
Hope these help.
There is a plugin called fly.vim that is super awesome to browse source code. It makes use of a cscope database and provides simple navigation mechanism. Combine it with autotags plugin that generates and maintains cscope and ctags for a project in a central location, and you can switch between different code bases with ease.
I was using Source Insight to browse the Linux Kernel source code and when I switched over to this combination, I had nothing to complain. It may take some time and/or effort to get in speed with this setup, though. If you know how ctags and cscope work, then, probably you'll pick it up in less than an hour. But the advantages: cscope indexes code fast, vim uses cscope fast, fly.vim queries through cscope and displays it fast, and in a usable format. Plus, it maintains jump history.
Is it possible to specify which functions should be folded by vim automatically.
In Netbeans, there is something like
// <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="user-description">
...any code...
// </editor-fold>
Do you know about something similar I can use in vim?
When I close the vim I want folded functions to be folded again if I open the file again.
This is actually a little different than what you're asking, because it doesn't deal with semantic folding, which NetBeans and other IDEs do. However, storing a set of folds is normally done using the :mkview command, and you can automate this command and the :loadview command to make it transparent to you. The details are in this Vim wiki page. I use one of the simpler versions in my vimrc, rather than the plugin, but both should work for what you need.
I scoured Google and SO for an answer but really couldn't find one, probably because I don't know the real name of these things.
annoying gutter
These gutters indicate nesting levels and folding options with little pluses and minuses and are completely useless to me, and take up a lot of spaces especially when working in split viewports.
Do you know how to get rid of them?
FYI I'm using the Janus distribution
That "gutter" is the fold column. You can turn it off via
:set foldcolumn=0
However, this usually is set by a plugin or a filetype plugin, so it will probably reoccur. You can find out who did this via
:verbose set foldcolumn?
If it's been set up by a filetype plugin foo, you can put the command to turn it off into .vim/after/ftplugin/foo.vim. If it's a plugin, read up on its documentation. (That's the downside of pre-made Vim distributions like Janus!)
I am using several languages, and currently I am obliged to indicate to vim with which of these the spell check must be done. Is there a way to set up vim so that it automatically detects the correct one? I vaguely remember that in a previous version of vim, when the spell check was not integrated, the vimspell script made this possible.
It would be even better if this could apply not only to a file but also to a portion of a file, since I frequently mix several languages in a single file. Of course, I would like to avoid to load several dictionaries simultaneously.
I don't know if there is a way to autodetect it, but if you put vim:spell:spelllang=foo,bar,baz at the bottom of the file, vim will set the spellchecking languages to foo, bar, and baz when the file is opened. Note that you must put at least one space before that text, or vim will think it's part of the file.
Since vim is missing this feature, I found it useful to define shortcuts like these in .vimrc:
command! Nb :set spelllang=nb
command! En :set spelllang=en