Extra Thimian

I’m used to being shafted as a Ruby and Windows user. The Ruby community is quite *NIX centric.

Speaking of which: Praising “open” and using Macs, makes a hypocrite at best, and an idiot at worst. Use OpenSolaris, *BSD, or Linux if you want to be open in spirit. Or, like me, stop bothering, and use what you are comfortable with, and stop pretending you use it for any other reason than that you are comfortable with it.

Anyway. vim.

After nano, vim is the best editor in the world (once you get used to its idiosyncrasies), making editing code, or plain ol’ text a breeze, and its distinction between editing and normal mode is quite sweet.

But, while using the official (well, as official as open source gets) gVim 7.2 distribution from vim.org, I noticed that it is compiled with -ruby (and -perl, or -python). Neither :ruby nor :rubyf work. Which makes the hack, test, hack, test cycle not smooth at all, since :rubyf % doesn’t work.

Fortunately, fixing this is easy, once you know how:

Install the official gVim 7.2 distribution, and get Wu Yongwei’s gVim build. replace the binariesof  your vim installation with the ones in his gVim 7.2 distribution. Done. This works even with the MinGW Ruby distribution from RubyInstaller.org.

Happy Vimming.

Filed under: Development Tools, English Language Posts, Ruby, Windows by Phill