Vim

I first learned Vim in university and, since then, it has been a welcome companion for the majority of my software engineering career. Working with Python and Go programs felt natural with Vim and I was always felt productive. Yet Java was always a different beast. Whenever an opportunity to work with Java came up, I would inevitably try Vim for a while, but fall back to IntelliJ and the IdeaVim plugin to take advantage of the rich language features a full-featured IDE can give you. ...

I write Markdown using Vim and the vim-pencil plugin and one of the things that particularly bothered me was that, by default, iTerm2 and the solarized colour scheme did not support italic text. I finally sat down this evening and got this working. Really, I just found and watched Greg Hurrel’s YouTube video explaining the whole thing. To enable italics requires updating the terminfo database. Terminfo enables programs to use the terminal in a device-independent manner. For us, this means that it allows applications to lookup the correct escape codes for displaying italics. If the terminfo database has the correct escape codes present in the database, italics are displayed. If not? No italics. ...

If you haven’t tried vim-test yet, please do. It provides a consistent interface for running unit tests from within vim for a variety of languages and test runners. It also has support for different methods of dispatching your tests from vim to a terminal to retrieve the results. vim-test works out of the box for a number of languages and is easily extensible to support additional languages. In fact, I recently contributed a Maven test runner for the Java language. If you are developing a Maven project, you can now run your tests from within vim using vim-test. ...

I’m not sure why this was so difficult to discover. For the longest time I was not sure how to create a new file using NERDTree. I finally sat down and figure out how it works. ...

The latest version of OS X (Mountain Lion) broke compatibility with the vim and the OS clipboard. In most cases you can configure vim to use the operating system clipboard by setting clipboard=unnamed in your .vimrc. Unfortunately this setting does not work in OS X because the default version of vim was not compiled with clipboard support. You can check if your version of vim is compiled with clipboard support by typing vim –version and looking for clipboard. A prepended + means support is enabled. A prepended – means support is disabled. ...