Vi Color Schemes
August 21, 2006 | Leave a Comment
If you do any significant amount of text editing in vi, you could benefit from syntax highlighting. Turning on syntax highlighting in Vi (or VIM rather) is as simple as adding
set nocompatible and syntax on to your ~/.vimrc file. While you are editing your .vimrc file, there are a ton of other cool things you can tweak which I recommend as well (ex. tabstop, nowrap, ignorecase, bs, etc). Once you have syntax highlighting on, you may decide you want a different color scheme. This is also simple.
You can put color scheme definition files in the ~/.vim/colors/ directory. The files will have a “vim” extension. You can load a color scheme by typing :colors [scheme_name] while in vi. In most OS installs there are a ton of schemes included, in OS X these are in “/usr/share/vim/vim62/colors/”. Included for me are: darkblue, desert, elflord, evening, koehler, morning, murphy, pablo, peachpuff, ron, shine, shine, torte, and zellner. If none of these tickle your fancy, there are a bunch available here or you could always build your own.
Tags: color, color scheme, color schemes, colors, darkblue, desert, editing, elflord, evening, koehler, morning, murphy, nocompatible, pablo, peachpuff, ron, shine, syntax, syntax highlighting, torte, vi, vim, zellner
EditPlus - The Greatest Text Editor
April 3, 2006 | 9 Comments
EditPlus is unmatched in a crowded space of desktop text editors.
This is an application which gracefully handles syntax highlighting for any imaginable programming language. Part of the strength here is in the simplicity of defining highlighting rules. They are all defined in easy to understand text files which are a breeze to modify or supplement. Of course all the common ones are built-in (C, C++, Java, Java Script, PHP, Perl, ASP, HTML, CSS, etc) but there are also a ton of user contributed languages (Maya, Quake 2, Ada, QBasic, FoxPro, LaTex, and so many more).
For those who are interested, it also supports auto-completion files in a similar manner.
Another major win is it’s ability to handle remote files through SFTP (or FTP) in such a way that they are no more difficult to work with than a local file. Other text editors try to accomplish and at least succeed at having the feature, but I’ve seen none that are as seamless to work with.
Keyboard shortcuts can be user defined, so any operation you find yourself doing regularly can quickly be mapped to your favorite keystroke. A huge win for developers.
Finally, the regular expression find and replace has made ad-hoc manipulation of text files something I can do without even thinking about it. All the fantastic abilities that surround this functionality add greatly to my comfort level with the product.
Unfortunately, I have on e criticism. There is no Mac version… This is most unfortunate to me, because EditPlus is the last reason I have for using Windows.
If you aren’t already using EditPlus, and you are on a PC, try this text editor for awhile. You won’t be sorry.
Tags: css, edit plus, editor, editplus, ide, php, regular expression, sftp, shortcut, syntax highlighting, text editor