vimming for fun and profit

Damian dropped in on Monday to word us up on the finer points of VIM insanity. So now I have an editor that can do anything, one way or another. And if it can’t, Perl can, and the two of them work well enough to get things done. As a test, I implemented an insert-mode LDAP lookup which uses Perl to do the LDAP stuff, leaving the editor bits to VIMs internal scripting language.

The Perl interface for talking back into VIM itself (eg reading and setting variables) is pretty horrendous, but I’ve already written a proof-of-concept for a module that will make life far more Perly, eg instead of this:

VIM::Msg(VIM::Eval("a:arg"));

we can do this:

print $a{arg};

I know which I prefer :)

When and if I get this module into some kind of usable state, it’ll go up to CPAN as VIM::Sane.

I also deleted my entire .vimrc and .vim/ and started again. Its now clean and nicely commented, and makes me happy. I finally know what I’m doing :)

I also got a chance on Monday to talk Perl with Damian at lunch, and got an answer to my Class::Std problems as well as lots of IO::Prompt related stuff. But I’m out of time now, will talk about that more later.