anjuta-gvim Preview July 11, 2008

I closed some big bad bugs yesterday, and managed to get a whole workflow (open a bunch of files, edit, save, close) working without any glitchy-ness. Most of the time. And while I’m no where near the quality required to ship this plugin, it feels great all the same. A phenomenally boring Youtube screencast.

There’s a very apparent bug in the video; it doesn’t change pages when the option is document is chosen from the Documents menu. I’ve already fixed it. If you liked this plugin, well, unfortunately you’ll have to wait a while.

There is a considerable amount of code required to be reviewed and there’s bound to be a lot of back and forth activity between Johannes and me. Hopefully, we can start the review process once Johannes gets back from GUADEC. If you absolutely can’t wait, I do have the patches required for the anjuta svn tree in my svn repo. The instructions are in the INSTALL file. Getting this to work was quite a hassle because of the odd quirks of some Vim plugins. While a vanilla vim works fine (so far…), a vanilla vim is boring (not to mention not worth using). The objective of this project is to give you all the power of Vim + all the power of Anjuta, with as few compromises as possible. One of the more frustrating issues I faced was with a plugin called MiniBufExploerer. MiniBufExplorer is a fantastic plugin that lets you look at all open documents at once, and at cycle through them with ease. I’d ideally like to package this with the Vim plugin, but I have to discuss those issues with Johannes first. For some crazy reason, MiniBufExplorer (MBE) when opened with a single file gets into a position where the contents of the file are displayed with MBE’s buffer number. So lets say I have a file foo.c open (as buffer 2), and MBE occupies buffer 3. foo.c is a normal file (it’s ‘buftype’ is empty), but MBE has a buftype of ‘nofile’. Now if I open another file bar.c (now MBE is displayed) and close it (MBE goes away), it opens foo.c as MBE, i.e. it’s buffer no. is 3 and buftype is ‘nofile’. Utter nonsense. The only work around I found for this was to set the MBE option: g:MiniBufExplorerMoreThanOne=1, which always keeps the MBE open. I’m really worried with what other plugins might do. Making this plugin robust looks like a very daunting task. Any tips?

P.S. The glade file shown is the Maemo version of Dasher. The only reason I opened it was that it was in my recent documents list.