VIM

Back in 2006 I learned, that KWrite (a simple text editor) was not enough to write PHP code with. I tried eclipse, but it seemed too complex and was way too slow on my old laptop.

So inspired by the Comfortable PHP editing with VIM series of Tobias Schlitt I learned VIM.

My blogpost about Vim as an IDE for PHP is a popular page and I often get requests about details of my setup. Please don't ask me anymore, since I intend to move away from this setup!

Some weeks ago I've been at a conference (GearConf) about team collaboration. Some of the tools presented there (like Mylyn) made me jealous of the java people.

So it was time to reconsider Eclipse. However editing text with what's called an "editor" in eclipse is a pain to say the least. But life's good and somebody already created eclim. Eclim allows you to keep using gvim for text editing but integrates with Eclipse to give you code completion, manual lookup, code projects and more.
This alone may not convince you, since I already have this integrated in vim. But there are at least three major advantages of vim+eclipse:

• There's not only the integration for PHP but also Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, C/C++, CSS, HTML and XML
• Eclipse comes with a bunch of other cool plugins (like Mylin)
• The code completion from eclipse is much more powerful then anything you can do with VIM. For example it also proposes you the correct classmembers after foo:: or $bar->

My collegue Jiayong just installed the bundled version of PDT with eclipse, ran the eclim installer and was ready.

However I'm much more addicted to pain, so I took the Ubuntu packages of eclipse 3.5.1, linked the pdt runtime download and all dependencies in a separate directory, checked out the GIT repository of eclim, configured the classpath in the ant buildfile and build eclim from source. The deployment of eclim can be looked up from the ant buildfile.
There are some more tweaks to do, which I can point out later, if you should dare to follow this road. You shouldn't have a need for this until you'd be interested to become famous and beloved and package PDT or eclim for Debian.

Do you already have experiences with eclim+pdt? Are there tutorials I've not found? Are you interested to come with me to explore this setup?

I'm sitting at Google's office in Zürich, participating at their Open-Source-Jam. I had the pleasure to meet Bram Moolenaar, the creator of VIM and to give a short lightning talk about VIM as your (PHP) IDE. For those looking for the scripts, I can direct you for now to the GIT repository of the VIM-debugger (that works with xdebug) and the debian mentors site for the packaged script.

The rest of my scripts will be packaged soon. You can quicken my effort by writing a comment to this blogpost and saying that you're waiting.

Hans Melis asks for a good PHP IDE and Tobias Schlitt will present PHP development with VIM at the Köln-Bonn PHP User-Group.

Since I also plan to make a presentation about VIM, I thought I could publish the draft of my presentation so far and kindly ask you to share your ideas about other cool things that VIM does for you.

Today, while watching the german footbal team win, was a good time, to hack a syntax checker for eZComponents Templates inside VIM. The result is, that I can type ":Eztlint" inside VIM and get a nice error window showing me the position of the first error.



Continue reading "Checking eZComponents Template syntax inside VIM"

The yet unreleased 2.1 version of XDebug has a nice new feature. The setting

xdebug.file_link_format allows you, to provide a printf like format for a link under the filename of an error message:



So here comes a quick walkthrough on how to open the file from the error message in (G)VIM: Continue reading "Firefox, VIM, Xdebug: Jumping to the error line."