I just added something to my .vim/c.vim to make [[ and ]] work even if the code does not have { on new lines.

    function! FindFunctionDefinition(dir)
            let l:lastpattern = @/
            if a:dir==-1
                    ?^\(\a.*(\_[^\)]*) *\)\{,1\}{
            elseif a:dir==1
                    /^\(\a.*(\_[^\)]*) *\)\{,1\}{
            endif 
            let @/ = l:lastpattern
    endfunction

    nmap [[ :call FindFunctionDefinition(-1)<CR>
    nmap ]] :call FindFunctionDefinition(1)<CR>

This will make [[ and ]] find the next and previous function even if the first { is not in the first column.

It would seem that either no one that codes for the Linux kernel does so under vim, or if they do they don’t have the time to share their vim configuration that doesn’t conflict with the kernel’s CodingStyle.

Below I will discuss some changes I had to make to my .vimrc and .vim/c.vim to work with C efficiently.

I just saw vim hint 1354 pop up in my RSS feed. It’s a neat idea… but it’s hard to decide what documentation should be looked up. Simply using the file type is insufficient.

It turns out that it’s a lot more awesome to do google codesearch lookup on it.

I just joined the #vim irc channel on freenode. In the topic is suggested visiting Vi-Improved.org. This site in turn had a pretty good tutorial, here are a couple related links:

• Vim-Tutorial

  • Vim Regular Expressions

• VIM Editor posts by Amir Salihefendic

  • Vim 7 - the graphical introduction
  • Workspace efficiency - Vim tip 1 of 3
  • Search don’t scroll - Vim tip 2 of 3
  • Taming your Vim config - Vim tip 3 of 3

Welcome to the 90’s! 256 colours are here!

It’s pretty sad. I got really excited today when I read the Tip #1312: 256 colors in vim.

I quickly installed the few colour schemes listed in the tip and was really impressed with the inkpot scheme… it’s pretty.

I love tags files for in coding, and enjoy using the tag feature in [vim]{tag/vim} as well as the derived tag-based completion. I do a lot of my development in the kernel, so all I usually have to do is put /usr/src/linux into my vim tags configuration.

Sometimes I have to do some user space hacking too, and I often forget all the names of glib and pthread library functions. Having a system wide tags file is very very useful. Below is a Makefile that I carry around with me and place in /usr/include to keep my system tags in sync.

I wanted to have vim colouring of source files in html format. There is Text::VimColor perl module, but it’s not in Debian.

Vim has a :TOhtml command (see :h syntax). I wrote a tohtml shell script to solve the problem using :TOhtml. And yes, the html was generated with itself.

Vim7 was recently released, and there have been several very nice articles by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier. Here is the listing:

• First look at Vim 7
• Vim tips: Using viewports
• Vim tips: Moving around using marks and jumps
• Vim tips: Folding fun

If you want to see more on vim, read the vim tips on vim.org site.

I found a bug in vim6.4 (my comment block was too big and the line after the comment block was not left-justified) and wanted to see if vim7 had a fix.

bash comand line

For a few years now I've been using vi editing mode for bash and anything that uses readline. Here is how I've set things up.

In .bashrc I use the following to enable vi editing mode:

        set -o vi

This allows me to type as usual and use ESC to get into vi command mode. Since ESC is so far away I frequently use control-[... unless I feel I need the exercise.