Tag: text editors

Carbon – beautiful screenshots of your source code

Carbon – is a very simple, but very useful web tool for creating beautiful screenshots of the source code.  And yes, before you start correcting me, I know that source code is always more useful as a listing, which can be copy-pasted, searched, and so on, rather than an image.  But there are still plenty of scenarios when you just need it fixed and frozen.

Carbon provides plenty of flexibility in a very friendly user interface – code highlighting for a variety of programming languages and configuration files, editor themes, window controls, fonts, and more.   There’s also a very simple way to tweet the screenshot directly from Carbon, if that’s what you want to do.

Zeal + Vim = offline CakePHP (and other) documentation

As any long time Vim user, I’m constantly looking for ways to tweak and improve my text editor configuration, and make me even more efficient.  Today, I came across a very handy addition – Zeal – an offline documentation browser for developers. (Thanks to this blog post, which also mentions Dash as an alternative for those of you on the MacOS.)

With Zeal, you can download a whole lot of documentation sets for pretty much any web development technology out there – programming languages, frameworks, libraries, tools, and more.  And then you can easily integrate Zeal with whatever text editor or IDE you are using.

For Vim, there are, as always, several options.  Some of them are listed here. I personally opted for the Zeavim plugin.  The installation is straight forward and everything works out of the box.  After giving a quick try, I decided to adjust my .vimrc file to use CakePHP framework documentation together with the PHP programming language documentation whenever I’m working with any PHP file.  Here’s what I had to add:

" Zeal offline documentation
let g:zv_file_types = {
       \ 'php': 'cakephp,php',
       \ }

Now, whenever I edit a PHP file and hit “,z” (I use comma as a leader, by the way), Zeal window pops up with the relevant documentation search.

It’s super fast. It works offline, and it’s awesome!

Vim as a PHP IDE – the complete guide

“Vim as a PHP IDE – the complete guide” is yet another one of those lengthy articles on how to setup Vim as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), specifically so for PHP developers.

Over the years, it’s interesting to see how with more powerful Vim, such guides become more and more focused on the selection and configuration of the plugins, rather than on tweaking Vim configuration.

Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins

“Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins” is yet another take on customizing the Vim text editor and making it into a full featured IDE.  Most of these things were possible for years (I even had my own blog post on the subject), but with every version of Vim it gets easier and easier to setup a more advanced developer environment.

Vim after 15 years

“Vim after 15 years” is yet another one of those “my Vim configuration review” posts by someone who has been using Vim for 15 years or so.

As someone who is also a long time Vim user, I have to say it’s quite common to review your configuration once in a while and remove some outdated bits which made it into plugins and Vim core, update plugins to newer versions, and replace plugins with newer alternatives.