Thomas Koch - VIM

Exploring Eclipse, PDT and Eclim

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:48:24 +0200

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?

Lightning Talk at Google about VIM

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:32:48 +0200

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.

Presentation Draft: VIM as your PHP IDE

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:01:33 +0200

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.

Checking eZComponents Template syntax inside VIM

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:22:12 +0200

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.

The implementation was extremly easy due to the very clean design of the eZComponents Template engine: The template engine compiles the template source in a tst tree (template syntax tree?) which afterwards is compiled in an abstract syntax tree, which should be more familiar to programmers.

The following code loads the template source file and tries to parse the tst of it:

CODE:

#!/usr/bin/env php <?php require_once 'ezc/Base/ezc_bootstrap.php'; $source = new ezcTemplateSourceCode( $argv[1] ); $source->load(); $parser = new ezcTemplateParser( $source, new ezcTemplate() ); try{ $tstTree = $parser->parseIntoNodeTree(); }catch( Exception $e ) { echo '"',$e->source->stream,'"', $e->errorCursor->line,' ', $e->errorCursor->column + 1,': ', $e->errorMessage; }

This code is called from the following vim snippet:

CODE:

function! RunEztlint() let l:output=system('~/.vim/plugin/eztlint.php '.bufname("%")) cexpr l:output cwindow endfunction set errorformat+="%f"%l\ %c:\ %m command! Eztlint execute RunEztlint()

Firefox, VIM, Xdebug: Jumping to the error line.

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:14:01 +0200

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: First we need to tell the browser, in my case firefox, that the link is no web link, but should be threaten special. We do this with the introduction of the new protocol "vim://".

Put this setting in your PHP configuration:

CODE:

xdebug.file_link_format=vim://%f@%l

Now instruct firefox which program handles the protocol. Therefor you need to open the about:config page and add two settings:

CODE:

network.protocol-handler.external.vim boolean true network.protocol-handler.app.vim string ~/bin/ff_xdebug_gvim

The ff_xdebug_gvim file is a script that parses the link and calls gvim with the appropriate parameters:

CODE:

#!/usr/bin/env php5 <?php // cut the vim:// prefix from the input. $input = substr( $argv[1], 6 ); // split the filename from the line number, separted by '@' // filenames could come in urlencoded $delimiterpos = strrpos( $input, '@' ); $file = urldecode( substr( $input, 0, $delimiterpos ) ); $line = ( string )( int )substr( $input, $delimiterpos - strlen( $input ) + 1 ); // --remote-silent opens an already running gvim session or creates a new one. Replace gvim with // vim if you like! system( 'gvim --remote-silent +'.escapeshellarg( $line ).' '.escapeshellarg( $file ) );

That's it. Thanks for your patience.

And as usually: Restart your webserver and chmod +x the script.

VIM an a PHP IDE

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:58:49 +0100

Today I read an article from Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Planet-PHP about Programming PHP with VIM. Since he want's to continue his series and I wrote a similiar text these days, I thought to post the text I wrote so far.

Maybe we can continue together to write a nice teaser to for PHP with VIM. It would be fine, to have one place (vim.org, php.net/docs ?) to collect all those nice helper scripts and plugins. The main benefit could be, that all the scripts can be installed together without overlapping key mappings.

So much for now, since I'm with my family to celebrate easter. Happy Easter to everybody celebrating it today!

VIM as an IDE for PHP

Contents

Templates
Codesniffer integration
Including Manuals
Autocompletition
PDV (phpDocumentor for Vim)
Tag Browsing with cscope (Identifier lookup)
- Build the taglist
Taglist Window
- Note
Debug with xdebug

Templates

TODO

Codesniffer integration

Codesniffer is a tool to check PHP code against a Coding standard. By integrating it into vim you can get the list of violations in a separate error window. The errow window allows jumping to each error in the source code, even if the line numbers have changed.

See help quickfix in the vim help.

Put the following code in $VIMHOME/plugin/phpcs.vim:

function! RunPhpcs()
    let l:filename=@%
    let l:phpcs_output=system('phpcs --report=csv --standard=YMC '.l:filename)
"    echo l:phpcs_output
    let l:phpcs_list=split(l:phpcs_output, "\n")
    unlet l:phpcs_list[0]
    cexpr l:phpcs_list
    cwindow
endfunction

set errorformat+=\"%f\"\\,%l\\,%c\\,%t%*[a-zA-Z]\\,\"%m\"
command! Phpcs execute RunPhpcs()

Now you can run a Codesniff for the current file via

:Phpcs

Including Manuals

Install the ManPageView script from Charles Campbell. It gives you access to the PHP manual, Perl manual and to man and info pages. The script could also be extended and I'd love to use it for Javascript and HTML, too. Make sure to take the most recent version, eventually from Campbell's homepage, since it may include bugfixes not yet uploaded to vimscripts.org.

You also need to install the links text browser, which is used to grap the online PHP manual:

apt-get install links

I took links, but elinks or links2 may work too.

After installation you simply press C-K on top of a keyword and the corresponding manual page will be opened in a separate window.

Autocompletition

Vim helps you to complete identifiers:

The first proposed item beginning with auto is an PHP function. Vim can autocomplete with different language dictionaries depending on the filetype. Thus it won't propose you any PYTHON function while you're editing a PHP file.

The second item is a word from another file I'm editing in the same Vim session. Thus you can easily complete Variablenames or Functionnames from other opened files.

Vim tells you also where it got the term from. Since the last item is from the same file, there's no filename written after the word.

PDV (phpDocumentor for Vim)

You do document your code with proper inline comments, do you? To make this task easier, Tobias Schlitt wrote a VIM plugin which automatically lookup some characteristics of the item you want to document and creates a Docblock sceleton for you:

@todo

Tag Browsing with cscope (Identifier lookup)

Just like in a big IDE like eclipse, you can easily jump to the definitions of functions and classes. Vim integrates cscope for the job (apt-get install cscope).

Build the taglist

Vim needs an index file for all identifiers. This file is build with cscope. First we create the file cscope.files which tells cscope which file to scan. In our case this are all files called *.php.

The -b option tells cscope to use the list from cscope.files:

cd project_dir
find . -name '*.php' > ./cscope.files
cscope -b
rm ./cscope.files

The shell commands from above left a file cscope.out in project_dir. Now we tell vim to use the generated tagfile:

cscope add project_dir/cscope.out project_dir

Note that you have to add the project_dir as the second argument to cscope add!

Taglist Window

Every IDE gives you an overview of all functions in a class, right?

Install exuberant-ctags ( >= Version 5.7 ) and the taglist vim plugin. On debian you go with:

apt-get install exuberant-ctags

vim-addons install taglist

Note

The 5.7 version of exuberant-ctags still has problems to parse PHP properly. It can not distinguis between the word "function" in a comment and a real function decleration. Therefore I still use a patched version of exuberant-ctags version 5.6.

Debug with xdebug

What's an IDE without a Debugger?

You can find the most up to date link to the vim-xdebug plugin at the remote section of xdebug.org.

Integrate PHP CodeSniffer in VIM

nospam@example.com (Thomas Koch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:16:54 +0100

You can integrate PHP Codesniffer in your VIM with the following code:

CODE:

function! RunPhpcs() let l:filename=@% let l:phpcs_output=system('phpcs --report=csv --standard=YMC '.l:filename) let l:phpcs_list=split(l:phpcs_output, "\n") unlet l:phpcs_list[0] cexpr l:phpcs_list cwindow endfunction set errorformat+="%f"\\,%l\\,%c\\,%t%*[a-zA-Z]\\,"%m" command! Phpcs execute RunPhpcs()

Put the code in $HOME/.vim/plugin/phpcs.php

You should change the standard option to your needs.

If you're using for example the php-vim configuration from Tobias Schlitt, you should change one line in your $HOME/.vim/ftplugin/php.vim:

from

CODE:

set errorformat=%m\ in\ %f\ on\ line\ %l

CODE:

set errorformat+=%m\ in\ %f\ on\ line\ %l

This is the first VIM function I wrote and I'd be happy about any advise how to make it better. As soon as I've added comments and propper configuration variables to the function, I'll add it to vim.org

UPDATE:

You get a quickfix window from which you can jump to the locations of the errors.