Vim is a great text editor. I've been using since 1997. I use it for everything: programming, writing documentation, composing emails, editing HTML pages such as this one, editing wiki, keeping my TODO list, etc. This page contains my Vim configuration and translations of Vim in Esperanto and French which I both maintain.

~/.vimrc

My ~/.vimrc contains a collection of settings and tips that I have accumulated during all my years of using Vim. I strive to make it portable across different version of Vim (6.*, 7.*), different build configuration (tiny, small, normal, large, huge) and different platforms (Linux, Windows).

Vim plugin

I wrote a couple of Vim plugins. The one I use the most is the LanguageTool plugin which integrates the LanguageTool multi-lingual grammar checker in Vim.

Vim Color Scheme

Colors! It may not be the most important feature of Vim but nice colors makes it more pleasant to work with Vim. Rastafari is a Vim color scheme for black terminals. The name of the color scheme stems from the dominant colors in this color scheme: black, red, yellow and green. This color scheme uses few colors and is suitable for a 8-color terminal (set t_Co=8) with black background but it also works fine in gvim. I dislike color schemes that define too many different colors. Syntax highlighting should not look like a Christmas tree. In case colors look wrong in the terminal, take a look at this tip. Colors should be quite consistent between the GUI and the terminal.

I've been using this color scheme for many years and fine-tuned it over the years. It seems that I'm not the only one who like it since some work colleagues also adopted it.

Here is a screenshot:

rastafari

Vim Patches

I'm addicted to the Valgrind memory checker and I use it to find and fix several bugs in Vim. Now that many of these bugs have been fixed, it is no longer easy to discover bugs in Vim using Valgrind. But once in a while I come up with some odd and nasty test cases that can cause memory overrun, use of uninitialized or freed memory, spot a memory leak, etc. Fixing them helps to make Vim the perfect editor. See this help page if you're interested in using Valgrind to debug Vim.

Vim in Esperanto

Vim is available in Esperanto since version 7.2. All messages of Vim, menus of gvim, and Vim's tutorial are translated. Do not hesitate to report errors or improvements if you spot any. Make sure they have not already been fixed in the latest version of the files available below. The number of Vimmers who use the Esperanto translation version is most certainly small, so let me know if you use and enjoy it :-)

Messages

vim7/src/po/eo.po

Gvim Menus

Tutorial

vim7/runtime/doc/vimtutor-eo.UTF-8.1

Vim in French

Since 2008, I'm taking care of the maintenance of the French translation of Vim. Please report errors or improvements after checking the latest version of the files below.

Messages

vim7/src/po/fr.po

Gvim Menus

Man pages

Tutorial

$Id: vim-en.php,v 1.5 2009/03/08 18:35:53 pel Exp pel $