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Already awesome

If you haven’t tried snipMate, you have to give it a test-drive.  If you want to define a new ruby class in Vim, type “cla<tab>” and you’re presented with your choice of class templates:

Enter a number, and the code is automagically generated for you.

The tweak

By default, hitting enter at the menu cancels the snippet.  However, a user can already easily cancel using escape, and this probably won’t happen all that often anyway (I don’t think ever for me).  So I altered the code to choose the first (most common) snippet if no number is entered.  This saves me a non-home-row keystroke in almost 100% of my usage.

The code

In plugin/snipMate.vim, comment out the last line of the s:ChooseSnippet function and add two lines in it’s place:

fun s:ChooseSnippet(scope, trigger)
  [snip...]
  " Original last line (which cancels on enter) commented out
  "return num == -1 ? '' : s:multi_snips[a:scope][a:trigger][num][1]

  " Two lines added to choose first snippet if none are selected
  let snip_to_return = num == -1 ? 0 : num
  return s:multi_snips[a:scope][a:trigger][snip_to_return][1]
endf

Pretty simple, huh? Oh, just remember to save a copy of the changed lines somewhere.  When you update the plugin, your changes will be erased and you’ll have to re-paste them.

Awesome plug-in!  Uh, ok… but what the heck does it do?!?!  Here’s a list of the goodness:

• syntax highlighting

• Jump to steps
  • CTRL-] opens the step definition in the current window
  • CTRL-W ] opens it in a split window (optionally hold CTRL with the ‘]’)
  • CTRL-W opens in a split preview window
• Autocomplete – it seems from the source that it should work, but I can’t get it going.  I posted a question on the cucumber mailing list.

It is unbelievably easy to create a wicked setup, although I spent half a day googling to narrow it down to the exsentials:

Downloads

1. Ruby with the One-click installer.
2. Vim’s self-installing Windows executable (this comes with many customizations you read about online, and ruby support, included)
3. snipMate, a plug-in that automatically expands common Ruby constructs (e.g. you type ‘cla<tab>,’ which becomes class…end with placeholders!)
4. AutoComplPop (must have!!!), an autocomplete plugin very much like Xcode’s – start typing and a popup list of completion options appears.  superTab, another plug-in that allows you to use tab to auto-complete Ruby code
5. wombat, a great color scheme

Global configurations

Add the following settings to /path/to/vim/_vimrc.

note: the autocomplete menu colors, and vim’s default font are disgusting, hence the changes.

Ruby-specific Configurations

In the vimrc above, the following is added:

• the first line sets up superTabs to look in the right place for Ruby completions (I use AutoComplPop now, see above)
• adds line numbers to several source code file types
• changes the ridiculous 8-space tabs to 2

That’s it!  Happy coding