Vim is a powerful text editor, based on the standard Unix vi command, but much improved. The different modes are confusing to new users, but when you’ve been using them as long as I have they just seem natural. My fingers have learned vi and don’t like having to use anything else. I end up with strings like jjjbcw in other documents.

I’ve built up a bundle of plugins and configurations which I use with Vim. Recently I’ve gone through, cleaned out the ones I never use, updated others and added new ones. If you’re interested you can download the bundle or check out my Vim wiki page for more details.

To install the bundle: untar it, then rename dot.vim to .vim, dot.vimrc to .vimrc, and dot.gvimrc to .gvimrc, being careful to first rename your existing vim files if you have anything you want to keep. There’s not much in my .vimrc and .gvimrc, so you don’t even really need to bother with them. Most of my configuration settings are in my vls-config.vim and vls-keys.vim plugins.

Cool new plugins included are: PyFlakes for on-the-fly Python syntax checking; TagList, a function/source code browser, most recently used (MRU) files, Case-persistant substitutions, and the NERDTree file explorer. I’ve also created myself acustom toolbar which reminds me to use some of the new features of Vim 7.0 such as folding, tabs, and the undo tree. Happy Viming!

Yes, this is yet another boring blog with posts about my cat and what I had for dinner. There’s still a heap of improvements I want to make, but it looks like I’m finally ready to start putting some content up here.

This is the latest incarnation of a long line of homepages, going all the way back to one I had to learn Vi to create at Auckland University in 1997. (I’m writing the draft for this post in Vim).

For posterity my old HTML blog from 2003-2004 is still here. I moved my website to being 100% wiki after that, but now it’s back to a blog/gallery/wiki mix.

Time for some acknowledgments. The blog is powered by WordPress, the gallery is running Gallery2, and the wiki is running the MoinMoin wiki engine. This stylish theme is the Stardust WordPress theme by Tom Baldovino hacked mercilessly to make it work for the whole site. And I’m running inside a Xen virtual machine which is running Linux (Fedora) with Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, with a touch of Javascript thrown in, all hosted by SliceHost.

So welcome to my blog.  It’ll be boring, but no one is forcing you to read it.