vi

Users of the Janus VIM suite may notice a change in the newest version of Janus. In previous versions, one could navigate around split panes (including to and from the file browser) by holding down COMMAND-SHIFT and then typing one of the arrow keys. This feature has been removed from the latest versions of Janus (I'm guessing because of some other conflict).

Here's how to add that back in.

1. Open your ~/.vimrc.after file.
2. Add the code shown below.
3. Save and restart VIM.

VIM with JanusLinux Mint claims to be the second most popular Linux distribution after Ubuntu. And it is largely based on Ubuntu/Debian. While there are many subtle differences, though, the main one is that Mint supports a broader range of desktop environments -- most notably, Gnome 3.

Janus is a package of tools that turn vanilla VIM into a powerful development environment. It is targeted at GUI versions (gvim and MacVim), and it comes with a large assortment of VIM plugins and scripts.

This short blog shows how to install Janus on a newly installed Linux Mint desktop. It assumes that you can run commands using sudo in a terminal.

SyntasticVim (VI Improved) is a powerful text editor that comes standard on most versions of Linux, OS X, BSD, and other UNIXes. With thousands of add-ons, console and GUI versions, and a fully scriptable environment, you can transform a humble text editor into a powerful development tool. In fact, there are several Drupal add-ons for vim.

In this article, I explain how to turn on syntax checking for PHP, adding code style validation along with error checking. We do this with three tools: The Syntastic Vim plugin, the PHP CodeSniffer PEAR package, and the Drupal Code Sniffer project from Drupal.org.

Here's a small tip for burgeoning Vim (VI Improved) users. Vim supports various colorschemes in its colorized editing mode. If you don't like the default syntax highlighting colorscheme that Vim uses, you can change it easily by running a command like this (within Vim):

:colorscheme koehler

The :colorscheme command takes one argument: the name of the colorscheme. Above, I am setting the syntax highlighting colorscheme to the koehler scheme. At any point, I can change it back to the default by running:

:colorscheme default