jlebar

Hello, world! I thought it would be fitting to begin this blog by talking about the most basic tool I use: Vim. I'm a total sucker for tools, and Vim is one of my favorites. I don't think I could make much progress hacking at the Mozilla codebase if it weren't for my well-shaven Vim setup.

Let's start with a few vimrc tricks:

• The wildmenu makes tab completion of filenames nicer. And it's even nicer when you tell Vim not to autocomplete object files. Add

   set wildmenu
   set wildignore=*.o,*.obj,*.bak,*.exe,*.class,*.swp
  

  to your vimrc.

• Vim's syntax highlighting sometimes gets confused when I edit HTML files with long Javascript sections (think Mochitests). You can force Vim to re-scan the whole source file with :syn sync fromstart. I have this mapped in my vimrc to ,s as follows:

   noremap ,s :syn sync fromstart
  

• Mozilla doesn't use tabs in their source files, so I force Vim to use spaces instead of tabs with

   set softtabstop=4
   set shiftwidth=4
  

  But this creates another problem: Makefiles need to have tabs. Here's an incantation which disables tab expansion in makefiles:

   autocmd FileType make setlocal noexpandtab
   autocmd FileType make setlocal softtabstop=0
  

In addition, I've found these Vim plugins to be indespensible:

• bufexplorer is a huge improvement over basic :ls, in particular because it can order the open files with the most-recently used towards the top. This makes the list much easier to scan.

• bclose adds a :Bclose command which closes the active buffer without closing its containing window. I almost always have at least two windows open in Vim, and :bd will close the window along with the buffer. :Bclose is a considerable improvement.

• spacehi highlights trailing whitespace. Make sure you read the docs to learn how to disable highlighting for help files.

• findmate helps me navigate the labrynth that is Mozilla's directory structure. Rather than type :e browser/components/sessionstore/src/nsSessionStore.js, I type ,,sessionstore.j, which invokes FindMate to locate any files matching *sessionstore.j* under the current working directory.

  I modified the script to ignore .swp files and directories starting with a dot. Just substitute this for the second line of the FindMate function (as one long line, not like it is here):

   let l:list=system("find . \\( -wholename '*/.*' -prune \\) -or 
     \\( -iname '*".l:_name."*' -not -name \"*.swp\" 
     -and -not -name \".*\" -print \\) 
     | sort -d | perl -ne 'print \"$.\\t$_\"'")
  

That's all I've got for now. Stay tuned for more!