Comfortable PHP Editing With VIM -7-

It's been quite some time since I last posted on my blog and even longer that I wrote something about VIM editing. However, I finally managed to re-work my VIM setup completely, so it's time for an updated.

First the sad news: VIP (VIM Integration for PHP) is dead. That "plugin" was created in, what we call now, the dark ages of VIM plugin development. Since then, writing plugins for VIM became a completely different business, largely pushed by the occurance of plugin managers like Pathogen and Vundle.

To relativate this: I still provide my current VIM setup via Github to deal for you as an inspiration. If you want to risk it, you can even clone and use it as yours. However, I won't guarantee that I don't mess it up. Therefore I recommend to fork and maintain it on your own. To make your VIM config stay slim, it's even better to start from scratch and just pick what you like. That's basically what I did with the setups of my friends Benjamin and Jakob, resulting in the new setup, which I describe further below. Thanks to both for providing their setups as inspirations.

For more compensation I also have a good news: I rewrote PDV - phpDocumentor for VIM completely and it now nicely integrates with current plugin managers. Its code is now way cleaner and maintainable and it has some fancy new features like templating support through my Vmustache implementation and support for making the generated doc blocks UltiSnippets snippets for even more ease in editing them (waving to Textmate users).

In addition, I created another small VIM plugin from one of the hacks in my old setup, which I call Skeletons. It allows you to define templates for creating new files of a certain type. The cool thing is: These files can include UltiSnips snippet code and pre-processed defaults.

That's already quite some news. But as I'm in a writing flow, stay tuned for the next post, where I will get into some detail on the cool plugins that I'm now using to enhance my VIM experience.