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. ;)

While my gray matter continues to flow out my nose (a cold has slammed me not unlike the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, which is said to be like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick), enjoy these fine links:

Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox - Image from Wikipedia

The Open Sourcerer: “How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala”

Anyhow, my personal opinion of Mono hasn’t changed much. There are no Mono applications in Ubuntu that make me go weak at the knees and get all excited[…]

In the latest, shiniest, bestest, release of Ubuntu to date, and it really is a cracking release, the desktop version of Karmic Koala (version 9.10) contains two Mono dependent applications in the default install along with the Mono VM and associated libraries etc.

Now, this time, we have 3 ways to go Mono free[…]

BLAFS: “Tomboy to Zim notes conversion” (Via Zim extras page.)

The script provided here is useful if you for some reason would like to convert your Tomboy notes to a set of notes for the similar Zim application. Both are desktop wiki style note taking applications. While Tomboy uses the Mono framework, Zim uses Perl and is in general considered to be leaner on resources than Tomboy.

This small python script converts notes written by the Tomboy application to notes for the Zim application. It does most of the work of conversion but some Tomboy formatting does not exists in Zim and is hence stripped of the notes (different text sizes, fixed width). Nested bullet lists in Tomboy is converted to a flat bullet list in Zim. Besides this the script does a descent conversion job, I think.

NY Times: “Hiking History: England’s Ancient Ridgeway Trail”

The Ridgeway is the oldest continuously used road in Europe, dating back to the Stone Age. Situated in southern England, built by our Neolithic ancestors, it’s at least 5,000 years old, and may even have existed when England was still connected to continental Europe, and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.

LA Times: “Physician convicted in cycling case”

A physician accused of deliberately injuring two cyclists by slamming on his car’s brakes on a narrow Brentwood road last year was convicted Monday of assault with a deadly weapon, mayhem and other serious criminal charges.

The three-week trial of Dr. Christopher Thompson drew close attention from cyclists, many of whom viewed the case as a test of the justice system’s commitment to protecting cyclists.