coding

Articles for people looking to transition from TextMate to Vim.

Arthur Debert (Stimuli): “Hello VIM, or quitting TextMate cold turkey”

In my last post I’ve mentioned my way through VIM. Quiting TextMate cold turnkey wasn’t easy. But fear not: there are a bunch of plugins that will make it a breeze.

Jeff Ober (Artful Code): “From TextMate to Vim”

TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an auspicious time to try out another editor.

Jamis Buck (the buck blogs here): “Coming home to Vim”

Fast forward three years. The vim landscape is different now. There is actually a Mac-friendly GUI version of vim now, MacVim, which actually looks like it belongs on OS X. Vim 7 supports UI tabs, and a much more powerful auto-completion mechanism than before. And plugins like rails.vim and fuzzyfinder.vim mean that TextMate no longer has a corner on powerful project navigation.

On Reddit: “Ask /r/vim: How do you work with a project in vim?”

What I love about TextMate is that I can open a directory and it will list its hierarchy in a drawer, making it very easy to navigate files. Add to that the wonderful Cmd+T which incrementally lets me search for files within this hierarchy and quickly open one in a new tab.

I’m looking for something like this in vim. Or I’m wondering how other people solve the problem of working on a project which requires quickly opening different files and navigating within a hierarchy?

Also useful for those switching from Mac to Linux. ;)

About a week ago, NetNewsWire on my iPod Touch began crashing on launch. I looked up info online and indeed it was a known issue. The intrepid developer Brent Simmons had already submitted a patched version to the App Store. In fact he noted it on his @nnw_iPhone Twitter feed on October 4th:

Uploaded 2.0.1 (free and premium) — fixes the crash-at-startup bug. Hopefully they’ll get approved and on the App Store quickly.

So far so good.

Since I know Apple’s App Store takes forever to shuffle stuff through what I can only imagine is an assembly line of elves from Santa’s Workshop working in the off season, I waited the usual 2-3 days to check for NNW’s availability. Yet I was only teased by an update for Cro-Mag Rally or one of the other (fine) Pangea games.

In the intervening nine days, I have occasionally and fitfully attempted to launch NetNewsWire, only to be denied by crashes. I also tried “Check for Updates” in iTunes, only to be presented with the dreaded

dialog box with the lowly, singular OK button. As if I have a choice. Just for the record, I am not OK with it. Not at all. And what’s with the instantaneous denial? Did you even check?

App Store holding area.

I am picturing some App Prison like in Tron where they torture the Programs for believing in the Users.

Please Apple — let my programs go!

UPDATE 10/16/09 17:17

Holy crap, the update finally showed up just now. And just short of a fortnight after it was submitted. Nice job, Apple! Feh.

If you run into this,

ERROR 1 (HY000) Can't create/write to file '/path/to/file' (Errcode: 13)

when attempting a MySQL SELECT * INTO OUTFILE command, you’re suffering from a permissions problem. The command is issued as if you are the “mysql” user, which includes its filesystem permissions.

The quickest solution is to save it in the /tmp directory, then move it afterwards.

Alex Young posted “Vim for TextMate fans” a couple of years back, in which he ponders how to get the best of both worlds:

I’ve used vim a lot over the years, mainly because I spent a long time using Linux and it was there so I used it. The choice was obvious: vim or vi were on almost every machine I had access to, and worked excellently both locally and remotely. Once I’d learnt the basics I was set, I knew enough to get my work done.

Then I found TextMate for Mac OS. The immediacy of TextMate made it easy to get started with, and it has many excellent features. The problem is, I’m not always using a Mac. But you know who’ll follow me around to every platform I use? Good old vim! So I started thinking, how could I make vim feel more like TextMate?

Check out his screencast for more.

A couple of days ago, Slashdot posted a story asking about “(Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?”:

So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old ‘write’ command (as I’ve been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn’t know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there’s probably lots of things like that, and likely things I’ve never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been over 2200 comments exploring the arcana of the Unix and Unixy command line. A lot of awesome lore to check out.

Yesterday came the next story, “(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?”:

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what’s out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?

570+ comments later, there’s a lot to check out there as well.

Today’s post was inevitable, “(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?”:

Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let’s hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like ‘M-x dunnet’ ;-)

200 comments and counting.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Vim story, apart from the various spiffy command tips and tricks, were links to other sites. Here are a couple, along with a few related others I’ve linked to before.

• Best Vim Tips (Wikia) (at the Vim Tips Wiki)
• Efficient Editing With vim
• GTD with Vim
• Vimperator - Firefox add-on that makes the browser look and feel like vim.
• Word War vi - “A retro styled side scrolling shoot’em up arcade game for linux. Your mission is to traverse core memory and rid the host of emacs.” (See my followup post “Compiling Word War vi on Mac OS X”.)
• 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 - Bram Moolenaar on Google Video. (PDF of the presentation.)