Daniel Duan's Articles About Vim

Daniel Duan's Articles About Vim https://duan.ca/tag/vim/ Git Commit Message, Vim, and Markdown It's been bothering me for years. That is, <code>#</code> is both the start of a comment in a git commit message, but also the syntax for headings in Markdown. Personally, I prefer using commit messages to populate pull request descriptions whenever possible. On GitHub, This happens automatically when the pull request contains a single commit. But I can't type, say an H3 as <code>### Heading</code> in the commit message (in Vim, most of the time) because it gets treated as a comment! But thanks to this twitter interaction with <a href="https://twitter.com/dmartincy">@dmartincy</a>, I finally solved this problem: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet">I haven't found myself in that situation, but maybe you could do 'git config core.commentChar ";"' before creating the commits? That will change the default git commit marker (#) to something that won't conflict with Markdown titles.— Daniel Martín (@dmartincy) <a href="https://twitter.com/dmartincy/status/1247271508420026368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> As mentioned by Daniel, Git has introduced a setting called <code>core.commentChar</code>, documented <a href="https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-corecommentChar">here</a>, which lets us control which character becomes the start of a comment line. Let's say we want to replace the default <code>#</code> with <code>;</code>, we can edit <code>~/.gitconfig</code> to include this preference: <pre><code>[core] commentChar = ";" </code></pre> … and this will affect every Git repository on this computer. For me, though, this broke git commit syntax highlighting in Vim: the comments, beginning with <code>;</code>, are no longer recognized as comments. To fix this, I updated Vim's syntax for file type <code>gitcommit</code>. In your Vim setting directory (<code>~/.config/nvim/</code> for me), create a file <code>syntax/gitcommit.vim</code> file (unless you already have one), add the following line: <pre><code>syn match gitcommitComment "^;.*" </code></pre> Note <code>;</code> matches my preferred <code>core.commentChar</code> for Git. Et voilà! Git commit message looks tippy-top in Vim again! <img src="/assets/2020/04/gitcommit.png" alt="editing git commit in vim, with alternative character being the beginning of a comment" /> Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:41:02 -0700 https://duan.ca/2020/04/13/git-commit-comment/ https://duan.ca/2020/04/13/git-commit-comment/ NeoVim, Swift and Make When it comes to Swift source code editing, nothing beats Xcode 6.3! That includes Xcode 6.2, which drove me to good'O Vim for a while. Except it's not the old Vim, I'm trying out <a href="http://neovim.org">NeoVim</a>. The most noticable difference in NeoVim compared to Vim is its recent addition of a built-in terminal. With the help of syntax highlighting and a Makefile, working with Swift this way turns out to be a fine alternative. (As a side benefit, I'm forced to use only local-context autocompletion. Now I can actually spell out full UIKit APIs 😉.) Here's a gif: <img src="/assets/2015/04/demo.gif" alt="Make Swift NeoVim Demo" /> Some details are easy to miss. I pressed <code>,m</code>, <code>,</code> being my binding for <code><leader></code>. A terminal session launched with the <code>make</code> command running. When that's done, I could press any key and the terminal pane was dismissed. Since <code>test</code> is the default target in my <code>Makefile</code>, the test suit for my Swift codes actually ran. Here's how the shortcut is set in <code>.nvimrc</code>: <pre><code>if has('nvim') nnoremap <leader>m :rightbelow vertical split <bar> :term make<cr> endif </code></pre> The makefile is pretty straightforword if you've worked with <code>xcodebuild</code>. <pre><code>test : @xcodebuild test -project ProjectName.xcodeproj -scheme SchemeName -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 6' | xcpretty clean : @xcodebuild clean </code></pre> <a href="https://github.com/supermarin/xcpretty">xcpretty</a> is a nifty script that makes <code>xcodebuild</code>s output much more readable. Happy vimming, Swifties :) Wed, 22 Apr 2015 11:46:17 -0700 https://duan.ca/2015/04/22/neovim-swift-and-make/ https://duan.ca/2015/04/22/neovim-swift-and-make/ One Weird Trick To Make Vim Go Faster On Your Mac I noticed something strange today. While playing with Ubuntu on a VirtualBox hosted by OS X Mavericks, Vim seems much faster than it being in iTerms2. How could that be? So I took the following steps to test things out: <ul> <li>Installed exact configurations with Vundle on the VM.</li> <li>Vim in Terminal.app</li> <li>MacVim with GUI.</li> </ul> Nope, Vim is still more responsive on Ubuntu. In fact, text input seem more responsive on this VM than the host OS in general! I thought I came to the light switching to OS X after using Linux as desktop for years, and now this? <a href="http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html#wtf(java.lang.String,%20java.lang.Throwable)">WTF</a>? Defeat and confused, I went to the Internet, and found <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4489885/how-can-i-increase-cursor-speed-in-terminal">something close to an answer</a>. Under System Preferences-Keyboard, drag the two slide widget ("Key Repeat" and "Deley Until Repeat") to the right most. Suddenly, Vim become faster! Turns out, key repeating is very important for Vim users. Fri, 02 May 2014 10:25:00 -0600 https://duan.ca/2014/05/02/one-weird-trick-to-make-vim-go-faster-on-your-mac/ https://duan.ca/2014/05/02/one-weird-trick-to-make-vim-go-faster-on-your-mac/