Tag: vim

Sometimes I have to use a Mac, and various things drive me nuts about it. The worst is git commit aborting because I typoed the writeout command after having written the best commit log ever. Here’s a google crumb for others experiencing this, and ideally for someone who wants to track down and fix the problem upstream.

Synopsis: do the below, and type the following once vim starts up: :Wq[enter]:q[enter]

$ vi || echo broken
broken
$ vim || echo broken
$ vim --version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Jul  9 2015 23:58:42)
Compiled by root@apple.com
[...]

/usr/bin/vi is of course a symlink to /usr/bin/vim that makes it act worse. Now, there are some folks who have various theories about why vi is different in this respect, or what vimrc stuff might cause vi to exit with an error if some error happened once upon a time in the editing session, but honestly I can’t find myself caring. Instead I just set my $EDITOR to pretend vi doesn’t exist anymore.

Or, how I read parts of the fine manual.

Yesterday, after spending way too much time trying to get find(1) to exclude vim swapfiles, I finally had it with them cluttering up my work directories. As is usually the case when vim triggers an itch, I thought, “there must be a setting for that,” and lo, there was.

set directory=~/.vimswap//

Make that directory and all the swap files go there instead. The trailing double slashes mean the swap files get named in such a way as to avoid conflicts.

Here are some other things added to my vimrc over the last year or so.

Show whitespace issues as spelling mistakes:

match SpellBad /s+$| +zet/

I used to always set my windows to 80 columns, but then I started using ‘set number’ and then all of that went out the window, so to speak. So now I do this to show where wrapping needs to happen:

set colorcolumn=80

This hack is kind of neat, it shows +/- change markers on the edge, based on git changes in your working copy:

https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter

(To make it less intrusive, I added highlight clear SignColumn.)

Once upon a time, I had a really complicated macro to search up the directory hierarchy looking for tags files. It turns out vim already does that if you add a semicolon in there (:help file-searching):

set tags=./tags;