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Vim After 11 Years

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21–30 of 254 posts

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#21

One of Vim’s strengths is that it starts lightning fast, so starting Vim from the terminal is trivial. With a modern, 256-color terminal like iTerm2 or Gnome Terminal, it will even look like gVim. But the best part is that you can drop into the command line at any time with Ctrl-Z, which suspends Vim, and your working directory is where you left off. Is there any reason to do this instead of !sh within Vim to drop in…

IIRC, !sh starts a new shell- so it depends on your context I suppose.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#22

netrw comes by default. No need to install NERDTree.

I was just typing out an email to the author of netrw regarding a problem I was experiencing.

Maybe someone here could help me out.

Environment:

- Lubuntu 12.10 64,

- LXterminal as well as UXTerm,

- GVim/Vim 7.3.547,

- both passive and active ftp,

- a local ftp server and http://secureftp-test.com/ to test it.

When I try to access a remote ftp directory, I can only open the directory that I typed in a path to. As soon as I navigate through the listed directories and hit enter on any, the screen splits into two horizontal panes and the top pane reads "File not found".

I tried this from Windows 7 Gvim/Vim (don't have the version handy but it was 7.3+) and it worked as expected.

From what I gather it just doesn't seem to look for the right directory after I hit enter in the list I think. Maybe it skips an extra forward slash somewhere or something?

I understand we're not really on the netrw/vim mailing list but any response would be appreciated!

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#23
post #18
post #9

Why do people keep suggesting iTerm2? The built-in terminal app on the Mac does Unicode and 256 colors just fine.

iTerm2 has few other fancy features, like horizontal and vertical splitting or Guake-like top-down terminal [0]. [0] http://ivanvillareal.com/osx/setup-iterm2-to-behave-like-gua...

I've used visor/simbl in leopard and snow leopard for years to get the top-down effect in terminal: http://visor.binaryage.com/

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#24
Every time I read an article like this, it's how a power user installs an array of plugins and customizations to really soup up Vim, which to me kind of misses the point. If you want that level whiz-bang, use Coda or Sublime Text 2 or Eclipse or whatever.

I don't recall where I saw this, but someone advised disabling syntax coloring in your editor to remove a crutch (and, secondarily, to visually simplify your environment). I've tried this with Vim and it's surprisingly nice [0]. You have to read the code more closely, and think more carefully about what's on screen, and this has the effect of focussing me more. Simplifying my environment, making it more sparse, but always having the power of Vim available, makes for a really potent, semi-distraction-free environment.

[0] Well, mostly. I leave it on in order to have three colors used: a good contrast color for code, a second contrast color for strings, and a third, very low-contrast color for comments and line numbers so that, if I want to see those things, I can look for/at them, but if I don't, they're easy to ignore. Likewise, visually distinguishing between strings and code continues to be really useful.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#25

I use nvi, and have tried to switch to vim a dozen or so times over the years. But there are so many irritating little quirks and misfeatures and annoyances that I can never manage to fix. Does anyone know of a guide to getting a sane, non-broken vim working with some basic plugins like syntastic? Last time I tried I couldn't bind F-keys for some reason, I couldn't get syntastic's error marking column to stay on inst…

It sounds like you want vim features. But vi compatibility mode is probably not consistent with these. Mapping f-keys should work fine in a GUI vim, but in a terminal F-keys may depend on configuring the terminal. You don't have to use syntastic if it doesn't work right for you, you can just use individual checker plugins or set makeprg and use :make. Mapping auto-complete to tab depends on not having multiple plugins fighting over the key. Most of this is a matter of particular plugins, not vim itself.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#26

One of Vim’s strengths is that it starts lightning fast, so starting Vim from the terminal is trivial. With a modern, 256-color terminal like iTerm2 or Gnome Terminal, it will even look like gVim. But the best part is that you can drop into the command line at any time with Ctrl-Z, which suspends Vim, and your working directory is where you left off. Is there any reason to do this instead of !sh within Vim to drop in…

You end up creating a new session each time when you do !sh. backgrounding Vim lets you use the same shell instance.

The other issue I have in general with the ! form is that some applications mess up osx vim. For example, try dropping into a node session (!node) and then quitting.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#27
post #24

Every time I read an article like this, it's how a power user installs an array of plugins and customizations to really soup up Vim, which to me kind of misses the point. If you want that level whiz-bang, use Coda or Sublime Text 2 or Eclipse or whatever. I don't recall where I saw this, but someone advised disabling syntax coloring in your editor to remove a crutch (and, secondarily, to visually simplify your enviro…

Customizing your editor to do what you want doesn't miss the point. It is the point. If my editor does exactly what I want, I have no need of Coda or Sublime Text 2 or Eclipse or whatever.

You can turn off colors. That's your customization because you like it. Good. Other people want other customizations.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#28

One of Vim’s strengths is that it starts lightning fast, so starting Vim from the terminal is trivial. With a modern, 256-color terminal like iTerm2 or Gnome Terminal, it will even look like gVim. But the best part is that you can drop into the command line at any time with Ctrl-Z, which suspends Vim, and your working directory is where you left off. Is there any reason to do this instead of !sh within Vim to drop in…

have your terminal map Ctrl-Z to fg, and you can cycle in and out of the shell almost instantly from vim with that key.

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#29
post #8

netrw comes by default. No need to install NERDTree.

I've recently uninstalled NERDTree in favor of netrw and I've been presently surprised at how little I miss NERDTree and how much more productive I am on default vim installations.

Was NERDTree making you unproductive? How?

Re: Vim After 11 Years

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently uninstalled NERDTree in favor of netrw and I've been presently surprised at how little I miss NERDTree and how much more productive I am on default vim installations.

Was NERDTree making you unproductive? How?

It's not that NERDTree makes one unproductive. It's that using NetRW on default vim installations allows you to get going without installing NERDTree.
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