17 Aug

Use MacVim and rails.vim plugin to edit your Rails work

Posted by admin in web.

A couple of years ago I bought a copy of TextMate, the preferred and “exclusive” thesis editor of Ruby on Rails community. Two years since I was a newcomer to Ruby power and Rails framework and TextMate helped me to insert quickly in this marvelous world. Coming back to then I chose this editor because on Rails official web site in that place weren’t others good suggested tools.

NOTE THIS: actually checking rustic on the station, a few things are really changed. I read, “The entire Rails essence team is using TextMate on Mac OS X. It’s a fantastic editor that ships by Ruby on Rails highlighting and macros”. I know it’s not true (Jeremy Kemper must is actually using a different tool)…. is it some kind of hidden advertising?

In any case the Macromates product is definitely a good one, but soon I felt I needed something different, something I could intimate to my colleagues, to my friends, without force them to invest 30 bucks or so. I needed something like vi… vi?

Now vi has been replaced by vim.
VIM (an improved version of vi) is already installed forward OSX or on Ubuntu and it’s emancipated. But to be used as my preferred Ruby and Rails text editor I needed it could manage 2 things:

  • some sort of integration with Rails (how?)
  • syntax coloring TextMate-like (yeah, I like it)

No problem: the first issue as been trivial. You need to download rails.vim and extract the zip file to ~/.vim directory. This completes the installation :)

For the second issue wanted to have IR_Black short dissertation (the theme I’m using under TextMate) on VIM too. This is how it looks like under TextMate:

… and you know what? It actually exists for VIM. Todd Werth, the the maker of IR_Black theme for TextMate made it available for the Unix clause editor. So I downloaded and put it under ~/.vim/colors directory, I launched vim and…

… this screen showed. From the shell, in the xterm, you have access to 16 ANSI colors sole, so forget the full color result. I didn’t comprehend that.

So? No imagination colors subject to VIM?

The solution is to download MacVim a project under the Google Code site, that easily access totally the colors, using all the previous settings before that time stored under your ”.vim” directory.
The final result is awesome: