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Vim 7 is Incompatible with the Vimspell Plugin

rlucas — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:00:00 +0000

On my Cygwin environment on Win XP, Vim 7 appears to run fine with one exception: the vimspell.vim plugin. It apepars that Vimspell conflicts with the new built-in spell check functionality in Vim 7. The symptom of this is that one starts to type and a massive amount of doubled or missed letters start to appear (and, no, I was not drunk when I noticed this). Removing the vimspell.vim plugin works fine.

However, I like to use a consistent ~/.vim directory across all my shells, so that I can store it in CVS and enjoy the same settings on every system. To do this across a heterogeneous environment of Vim 6 and Vim 7 boxen, I have made the following change to vimspell.vim:

61c61 < if exists("loaded_vimspell") || &compatible --- > if exists("loaded_vimspell") || &compatible || v:version >= 700

This will short-circuit out of vimspell before it gets loading if the version is Vim 7.0 or above.

Outlook to Remind (out2rem) Converter Script v0.0.1

rlucas — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 07:00:00 +0000

Update: I have fixed some stuff (time format and placement of AT keyword) and have posted v0.0.2 at the link below.

Please find here a short Perl script to dump out your Microsoft Outlook appointments in Remind format.

This should be useful to those of you who, like me, are tracking the whole plaintext / console / CLI resurgence as indicated here among other places.

If you have suggestions, please drop me an email at rlucas at tercent.com, and / or add helpful notes to the 43Folders Wiki.

Vim 7.0 Delights and Amazes with Beautified Auto-completion

rlucas — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:00:00 +0000

Randall Lucas 2006-06-21

Vim, the text editor extraordinaire, came out with version 7.0 last month. At some point, unwittingly, I had updated my work computer — Cygwin under Windows XP — using the Cygwin setup.exe file, not expecting any major version number changes. Hence, I didn’t even realize that Vim 7 was now on my machine.

This morning, I was doing as I normally do in writing a document with many recurrences of the same word — “ctrl-N” to cycle through possible completions of the word — when an odd grey-and-purple blob appeared below my cursor, filled with words! Unsettled, I lifted my fingers from the keys — what was this colorized monstrosity?

And then I realized. Vim was giving me “tool tips.” Here, in a console window, using naught but VT100 control codes. Jaded IDE addicts will say: “sure, but my GUI IDE has had those for years.” Perhaps. But I can use my tool tips in a German cybercafe, over an SSH session from a Danger Hiptop, or over a serial line in a generic data center.

For Perl, populating the tool tips with syntactically valid items (method names, operators, etc.) will be hard, at least according to the conventional notion that “only perl can parse Perl.” But, for Ruby, Python, and, should the need arise, C or Java, adding syntax-awareness (see “:help complete-items”) should be just an exercise in glue coding.

If you manipulate text (and if you aren’t already an adept of another cult editor), then by all means get Vim!