Tweaking VIM ...

Here are some vim tweaks I used to improve productivity with VIM.

Pathogen

Utility to manage ‘runtimepath’ with ease. It facilitate drastically plugins installation.

• More information on Pathogen here

Installation

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle
$ curl -Sso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim \
    https://raw.github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen/master/autoload/pathogen.vim

Runtime Path Manipulation

Add this to your vimrc:

execute pathogen#infect()

If you"re brand new to Vim and lacking a vimrc, vim ~/.vimrc and paste in the following super-minimal example:

execute pathogen#infect()
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on

Tabular

As one could guess, this plugin will faciliate formatting text in tabular forms. Many different formats are supported and this plugin is real magic!

• Watch this vimcast to see it in action!

Installation

$ cd ~/.vim/bundle
$ git clone git://github.com/godlygeek/tabular.git

Once installed, you can browse documentation inside VIM if you installed Pathogen.

:Helptags
:help tabular

Syntastic

This plugin will runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn"t have to compile their code or execute their script to find them.

• More information Scrooloose Syntastic site
• You might want to check other plugins made by Scrooloose (browse on github)

Installation

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic.git

:Helptags
:help syntastic