I used VIM whole my life but recently I am a bit tired of it because I am lost in buffers, windows, and tabs when working simultaneously with 20 files or so in a big project (with 500k LOC, and hundreds files).
Whenever i do :make, :grep, etc, new buffers are jumping out in the current window.
The same happens for the tags. At some point this starts to be very confusing because I really have to focus where things are in a VIM.
What are a proven and easy ways to control this behavior?
Use :hide to get rid of all windows unless you really need them open.
I'm not sure why tags are creating a new window for you, CTRL+] should re-use the current window.
nnoremap + 4<C-W>+ and nnoremap - 4<C-W>- make it much easier to resize windows, along with the standard <C-W>_ and <C-W>|.
Get a 22" monitor (minimum) and use :vsplit to show files side by side. I find this is even more important than having two smaller monitors.
Use <C-W>L, <C-W>H etc to move windows around. Don't forget :tab sp to open the current file (or a new one) in a new tab.
:map <LEFT> <C-W>h and :map <RIGHT> <C-W>l, etc make it much easier to move between windows. :map <C-LEFT> :tabprev<CR> and :map <C-RIGHT> :tabnext<CR> make it much easier to move between tabs.
And finally, if you need to have 20 files open regularly, this could be a sign that your code is poorly organized. If possible, features should be contained within a single file, then you just need to focus work on one feature at a time.
I tested out Eclim http://eclim.org/ a while ago for a friend. Basically, it lets you run Eclipse in a headless mode while using vim for editing and so on. With the extension, it allows Vim to draw on all the strengths of both worlds, adding for instance Eclipse's project tree to your favourite editor!
Installation was a bit daunting back then, but once I had it up and running, it was really smooth and quite a brilliant solution. Try it out, I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed. And the installation is probably easier now. :)
Oh, I should also mention that there are several Eclim-setups. You can have headless Eclipse with vim as your primary interface (as I first mentioned), you can have a headed Eclipse and Vim, so that you can easily switch back and forth (in the same project no less), or you can have Vim integrated into Eclipse itself.
Run multiple vims. I use "konsole" on my Linux machine. It allows me to open many tabbed linux terminal sessions in one window. I can double click the tabs to name them, e.g. "models", "views", "controllers", etc. In each of these tabbed linux terminals, I'll have a vim process running that has usually 2 or 3 files open at a time.
Another option is to find and IDE that has Vim mode, so you can still use most of your key commands.
As a longtime vim user, it pains me to say it, but--it might be time for you to graduate to a full-fledged IDE. You can still use vim as your editor in most cases, but the IDE will handle file management and navigation for you, and probably will simplify your make and grep workflows (e.g., structural search beats the pants off of grep). What language are you working on?
Vim-CtrlSpace lets you organize Tabs, Buffers, Sessions (workspaces) + fuzzy search.
It is quite suitable to work on large projects. That's how I actually come up with it.
Before, I used 'jlanzarotta/bufexplorer.git' and 'xolox/vim-session'
You can check the demo on YouTube.
Related
I work with a medium sized team of developers, with half being Linux developers using VIM on Ubuntu and MacVIM on OSX, and the other half being Windows developers using Visual Studio 2010 or later.
A fair bit of time has been wasted in the past when handling things like SVN operations failing due to mixed line endings, or changes to code reviews due to a mix of hard-tabs versus spaces-as-tabs (and sometimes of varying lengths, ie: 4 spaces vs 2 spaces vs 8 spaces, etc), and I would like to put an end to it.
The plan is to adapt a common coding style we've designed, which is almost identical to the Linux Kernel coding style. For all developers, we could require them to run their code through the checkpatch.pl script used by Linux kernel devs, but our code includes C, C++, and C#, so we would need to generalize the rule checker script beyond just ANSI C.
Is there a generic way to implement a rule set for VIM, and another for Visual studio? We'd like to generate a script that checks entire files, which could be hooked into our version control system so that it's run on code before commits complete, and perhaps as a run-time script to enforce the style as coders type?
Thank you.
EditorConfig seems to do exactly what you want in Vim, Visual Studio, and a lot of other editors and IDEs.
The run-time "script" is the best first-line of defense. In this case, it will be various Vim and Visual Studio settings to help enforce your code style. That alone will catch quite a few problems. Keep in mind, this won't catch everything, but will encourage the coding style you want.
I've worked across Linux & Visual Studio in a team before (and sometimes by myself). The whole Tabs/Spaces issue drove me nuts as there would be wholesale groups of lines that were either shifted WAY over or not enough. To solve this, I ended up using these three settings in Vim (also set similar values in Visual Studio), thus catching one class of issues at the root.
Vim
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4 " Mainly for if/for/while/general {} block indentation. 4 spaces.
set softtabstop=-1 " Allows us to use the Tab key and have it act like shiftwidth.
Visual Studio
Insert spaces when Tab key is pressed.
Shift 4 spaces on indent inside code block
They key is getting rid of the Tab characters, or at least having both systems use the SAME SETTINGS (i.e. both using Tab with the same values or SPACEs substituting as Tabs)
Something to watch out for:
Someone copying a file from one Operating System to a different one and then checking the file into SVN on that machine. SVN will blindly commit, say, a DOS line-ending file from a UNIX system. You want to checkout/commit files on the same system only. Otherwise, checking out/editing/committing files all on the same OS should present no issues, as SVN can convert the line endings upon checkout. You can "fix" this by loading a file into Vim and then converting the line-endings to the particular OS you want by typing ":set fileformat=dos" (if you want to change to Windows-style), ":set fileformat=unix" (for unix style), or finally ":set fileformat=mac" for Mac.
As far as the code style goes, as you probably already know, both Vim and Visual Studio offer lots of flexibility there. While I cannot give you the specific settings for Vim, the options to look at are
autoindent
cindent
cinoptions (implied from cindent)
cinkeys (implied from cindent)
comments (default is probably fine, but here for thoroughness)
So, you will want
set autoindent
and cindent should be automatically set when editing a C or C++ file. The defaults for cinoptions and cinkeys are ok for me, but I have tweaked them in the past when working with a different group.
Don't forget about using the '=' command over a selected range of lines to reformat the code! This can be very handy!
I shy away from the completely automatic SVN backend method because it may take longer than you expect to get it right, and when it screws up, it will probably take more time out of your day than you expect as well. After all, you really just want to be productive, right?.
Discipline up front is key!
When I do a global search/replace in a project, Sublime will automatically open all the files involved, and not save them. I then have to manually save every single file.
Is there a way to have Sublime automatically save all the changes that have been done, and not open the files that where not previously open?
Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me with this.
http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&p=40348
I think it's Option + Command + S(Mac) or Command + Alt + S(Win).
Just performed a similar task with the free Visual Studio Code. Replace in Files without opening files and fast. Just made 60k changes in just a few minutes.
Robust if awkward.
While it doesn't change the fact that Sublime Text doesn't seem to be the best tool for this job, here's a practical workaround procedure I've come to rely on. It's reasonably slow but painless if done correctly. Memory consumption impact seems negligible, if you're wondering. The ballpark of my use cases is up to about 10k files in up to a handful of minutes on a mediocre memory-cramped machine using Sublime Text 3.2.2 (3211) on Windows 10 Pro x64.
Requirements
You'll need the package SideBarEnhancements to be installed.
…which in turn relies on Sublime Text 3 or newer as of writing this.
Procedure
(Could probably be deferred until step 3.) You add the directory A that you're going to operate on to the project sidebar.
You initiate your batch replacement operation over numerous files inside directory A.
Sublime Text takes its time to open numerous tabs belonging to directory A recursively and perform replacement in each.
You right-click on the directory A in the project sidebar to bring up its context menu and choose "Save Views".
Sublime Text takes its time to save each tab belonging to directory A recursively.
You right-click on the directory A in the project sidebar to bring up its context menu and choose "Close Views".
Sublime Text takes its time to close all tabs belonging to directory A recursively.
Disclaimers
Warning
Do not make the mistake of skipping step 3 or you'll effectively become stuck in a GUI loop of writing confirmation dialogs defaulting to "Yes" for however many thousands of files you're operating on.
If you decide to abort operation between steps 2 and 3 — your best course of action, is to back the files up on disk, proceed with the outlined procedure and then restore the backup.
Caution
All of the tabs belonging to the directory you'll operate on will be closed by the end of this procedure. If you need a substantial portion of them to remain open throughout replacement — consider organizing the files contained into a sub-directory structure conducive to cherry-picking.
General advice
As a rule of thumb, before proceeding with this procedure, it would be wise to check if the required context menu entries are in fact present (greyed out or not) in your combination of editor+package versions. And to be on the safe side, you might want to back up your data and Sublime Text session before massive operations.
I made a simple regex search in Netbeans 7.3 on Windows (using Ctrl+F):
\{\{.*?\}\}
The results get highlighted correctly and the question is - how to extract highlighted text search results? Let it be copying to clipboard, saving as file or whatever else.
Is there any method doing this?
Maybe someone has any suggestion of alternative quick approach to such task in Netbeans? (or other editor)
What OS are you running? If OS X or Linux, read on!
I'm not sure about automatically copying the highlighted results to the clipboard, but I do workaround this quite a bit as well.
The easiest way to accomplish this for me without leaving NetBeans is to simply open a built in terminal window through Window>Output>Terminal (in 7.2.1) - I then navigate to my project, and run the RegEx that I built in the Find feature with my tool of choice. In fact, I use the built in terminal for this type of quick stuff in NetBeans quite a bit. If running Linux, using clipboard tools like xsel (http://linux.die.net/man/1/xsel) in combination with a built in terminal emulator can allow for devising some nice workflow shortcuts within IDEs if you are more comfortable working/coding at a terminal. Note that built in terminal emulators like the one in NetBeans is likely not going to play nicely with cut/copy/paste using the mouse, for various reasons that I won't get in to here.
As far as a built in/extension based solution for something like this, it would be helpful! I am not aware of one.
Hope this workaround helps in the meantime.
I am writing a windows program (no mfc) and need to output a status line to the operator every few seconds or so. I tried using rich text boxes but after so many hours it seems to hang up. Does anybody have an suggestions on what I can use instead?
People mentioned that my buffers might have been exhausted. I thought I had planned for that. After I had about 1000 lines displayed I would take the first 500 and remove them using the select and cut options in rich text boxes. I still ran into the same problem.
This question appears relevant, and this one too. But they don't give any concrete recommendations for an alternative to rich text boxes.
You might try the Scintilla control (scintilla.org) which does not appear to have any hard limitations on text size. It has a permissive license. It is used by many text editors such as Notepad++, Notepad2, Code::Blocks, FlashDevelop. I haven't tried it personally but there from the documentation it looks easy to use it in a Windows API application. Of course, it might be overkill for your purposes.
If you keep appending to the text in the control every few seconds for hours then you are probably running into some memory constraint on the control or the process. I think you would have this problem with any control you choose given update frequence and how long you're running the program.
Have you considered implementing a simple circular buffer for the content of the text box? Say only keep the last hour's messages. You could maintain a separate log file for history if the operator needed to go back in time for hours.
I ended up writing my own control to do this, essentially duplicating the Output window in Visual Studio. It was a success, but it ended up being much more code than I thought it would be when I started - I insisted on features such as auto-scrolling when the cursor was on the last line, select/copy, bold text, etc. It was backed by a std::deque so I could limit the number of lines stored for the window.
Unfortunately the code belongs to a former employer so I can't share it here.
I was going to create the C++ IDE Vim extendable plugin. It is not a problem to make one which will satisfy my own needs.
This plugin was going to work with workspaces, projects and its dependencies.
This is for unix like system with gcc as c++ compiler.
So my question is what is the most important things you'd need from an IDE? Please take in account that this is Vim, where almost all, almost, is possible.
Several questions:
How often do you manage different workspaces with projects inside them and their relationships between them? What is the most annoying things in this process.
Is is necessary to recreate "project" from the Makefile?
Thanks.
Reason to create this plugin:
With a bunch of plugins and self written ones we can simulate most of things. It is ok when we work on a one big "infinitive" project.
Good when we already have a makefile or jam file. Bad when we have to create our owns, mostly by copy and paste existing.
All ctags and cscope related things have to know about list of a real project files. And we create such ones. This <project#get_list_of_files()> and many similar could be a good project api function to cooperate with an existing and the future plugins.
Cooperation with an existing makefiles can help to find out the list of the real project files and the executable name.
With plugin system inside the plugin there can be different project templates.
Above are some reasons why I will start the job. I'd like to hear your one.
There are multiple problems. Most of them are already solved by independent and generic plugins.
Regarding the definition of what is a project.
Given a set of files in a same directory, each file can be the unique file of a project -- I always have a tests/ directory where I host pet projects, or where I test the behaviour of the compiler. On the opposite, the files from a set of directories can be part of a same and very big project.
In the end, what really defines a project is a (leaf) "makefile" -- And why restrict ourselves to makefiles, what about scons, autotools, ant, (b)jam, aap? And BTW, Sun-Makefiles or GNU-Makefiles ?
Moreover, I don't see any point in having vim know the exact files in the current project. And even so, the well known project.vim plugin already does the job. Personally I use a local_vimrc plugin (I'm maintaining one, and I've seen two others on SF). With this plugin, I just have to drop a _vimrc_local.vim file in a directory, and what is defined in it (:mappings, :functions, variables, :commands, :settings, ...) will apply to each file under the directory -- I work on a big project having a dozen of subcomponents, each component live in its own directory, has its own makefile (not even named Makefile, nor with a name of the directory)
Regarding C++ code understanding
Every time we want to do something complex (refactorings like rename-function, rename-variable, generate-switch-from-current-variable-which-is-an-enum, ...), we need vim to have an understanding of C++. Most of the existing plugins rely on ctags. Unfortunately, ctags comprehension of C++ is quite limited -- I have already written a few advanced things, but I'm often stopped by the poor information provided by ctags. cscope is no better. Eventually, I think we will have to integrate an advanced tool like elsa/pork/ionk/deshydrata/....
NB: That's where, now, I concentrate most of my efforts.
Regarding Doxygen
I don't known how difficult it is to jump to the doxygen definition associated to a current token. The first difficulty is to understand what the cursor is on (I guess omnicppcomplete has already done a lot of work in this direction). The second difficulty will be to understand how doxygen generate the page name for each symbol from the code.
Opening vim at the right line of code from a doxygen page should be simple with a greasemonkey plugin.
Regarding the debugger
There is the pyclewn project for those that run vim under linux, and with gdb as debugger. Unfortunately, it does not support other debuggers like dbx.
Responses to other requirements:
When I run or debug my compiled program, I'd like the option of having a dialog pop up which asks me for the command line parameters. It should remember the last 20 or so parameters I used for the project. I do not want to have to edit the project properties for this.
My BuildToolsWrapper plugin has a g:BTW_run_parameters option (easily overridden with project/local_vimrc solutions). Adding a mapping to ask the arguments to use is really simple. (see :h inputdialog())
work with source control system
There already exist several plugins addressing this issue. This has nothing to do with C++, and it must not be addressed by a C++ suite.
debugger
source code navigation tools (now I am using http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1638 plugin and ctags)
compile lib/project/one source file from ide
navigation by files in project
work with source control system
easy acces to file changes history
rename file/variable/method functions
easy access to c++ help
easy change project settings (Makefiles, jam, etc)
fast autocomplette for paths/variables/methods/parameters
smart identation for new scopes (also it will be good thing if developer will have posibility to setup identation rules)
highlighting incorrect by code convenstion identation (tabs instead spaces, spaces after ";", spaces near "(" or ")", etc)
reformating selected block by convenstion
Things I'd like in an IDE that the ones I use don't provide:
When I run or debug my compiled program, I'd like the option of having a dialog pop up which asks me for the command line parameters. It should remember the last 20 or so parameters I used for the project. I do not want to have to edit the project properties for this.
A "Tools" menu that is configurable on a per-project basis
Ability to rejig the keyboard mappings for every possible command.
Ability to produce lists of project configurations in text form
Intelligent floating (not docked) windows for debugger etc. that pop up only when I need them, stay on top and then disappear when no longer needed.
Built-in code metrics analysis so I get a list of the most complex functions in the project and can click on them to jump to the code
Built-in support for Doxygen or similar so I can click in a Doxygen document and go directly to code. Sjould also reverse navigate from code to Doxygen.
No doubt someone will now say Eclipse can do this or that, but it's too slow and bloated for me.
Adding to Neil's answer:
integration with gdb as in emacs. I know of clewn, but I don't like that I have to restart vim to restart the debugger. With clewn, vim is integrated into the debugger, but not the other way around.
Not sure if you are developing on Windows, but if you are I suggest you check out Viemu. It is a pretty good VIM extension for Visual Studio. I really like Visual Studio as an IDE (although I still think VC6 is hard to beat), so a Vim extension for VS was perfect for me. Features that I would prefer worked better in a Vim IDE are:
The Macro Recording is a bit error prone, especially with indentation. I find I can easily and often record macros in Vim while I am editing code (eg. taking an enum defn from a header and cranking out a corresponding switch statement), but found that Viemu is a bit flakey in that deptartment.
The VIM code completion picks up words in the current buffer where Viemu hooks into the VS code completion stuff. This means if I have just created a method name and I want to ctrl ] to auto complete, Vim will pick it up, but Viemu won't.
For me, it's just down to the necessities
nice integration with ctags, so you can do jump to definition
intelligent completion, that also give you the function prototype
easy way to switch between code and headers
interactive debugging with breaakpoints, but maybe
maybe folding
extra bonus points for refactoring tools like rename or extract method
I'd say stay away from defining projects - just treat the entire file branch as part of the "project" and let users have a settings file to override that default
99% of the difference in speed I see between IDE and vim users is code lookup and navigation. You need to be able to grep your source tree for a phrase (or intelligently look for the right symbol using ctags), show all the hits, and switch to that file in like two or three keystrokes.
All the other crap like repository navigation or interactive debugging is nice, but there are other ways to solve those problems. I'd say drop the interactive debugging even. Just focus on what makes IDEs good editors - have a "big picture" view of your project, instead of single file.
In fact, are there any plugins for vim that already achieve this?