Hi Ok, first, I'm not actually sure if what you downloaded is the right version of macvim, since I didn't even *know* it was on sourceforge. The first thing I'd do is go to http://code.google.com/p/macvim/wiki/Snapshot and download the latest snapshot from there.
Secondly, I'll paste in an article about Macvim that I wrote a while ago that talks about using it with Voiceover. As I said, I wrote it a little while ago now, but I've reread it, and it's still pretty useful, I think. Feel free to ask me any more questions, though. Home Page: http://code.google.com/p/macvim/ So, you're a Voiceover user on the endless hunt for a good text editor. You might be a programmer like me, or someone who does desktop publishing in Latex or you just want to write text and don't need all the bells and whistles of a word processor. But there's a problem. Most of the text editors everyone raves about in OS X are completely unusable. For whatever reason, the built in text editing interface in OS X just doesn't seem to want to do what text editor authors want it to do, and so heavy hitters like BBedit and Textmate and even aquamacs, the GUI version of Emacs, just don't work for us. There are alternatives. Smultron, SubEthaEdit even textedit, but for me at least, they're not quite good enough. They either don't have enough programming features, or the ones they do have take a lot of scripting. And so, we come to MacVim. As the name suggests, MacVim is a cocoa port of an existing editor, Vim, which has a pretty long history in the unix world and, in fact, is built into OS X without you downloading anything as a terminal application. MacVim is a lot better than this, since, being a GUI OS X application, you can open files in it from finder, a lot of the familiar OS X keystrokes work, you have access to the clipboard and so on. Vim, however, has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not really like any other editor you've ever used, and so if you don't find, say, textedit lacking in features, you should probably go no further. But if you're up for some adventure, and don't mind doing a bit of fiddling to get your environment the way you want it, keep reading. The first thing to do, after you've downloaded this, is create a file in your home directory called ".vimrc". You'll probably want to use another text editor to do this, and it might warn you that this is a hidden file when you try to save it, but to get the most out of MacVim with VO, this is essential. In the file, cut and paste these settings set winheight=10 set lines=50 set virtualedit+=onemore set scrolljump=10 set errorbells No, these aren't the only settings you'll ever need, but they'll make using it with VO a lot more comfortable. Now that you've created this file, you can actually run MacVim. What you'll see, is a fairly ordinary application: edit area, toolbar, menu. The first odd thing will be, it looks like your edit area's full of tilde characters. You can safely ignore these. They're not actually *in* your file, they're what Vim displays when it has nothing to display. In other words, it's telling you you're in an empty file, and you'll probably never think about them again for the rest of the time you use the editor. I'm presuming at this point that you know nothing about Vim. If you do, you'll have to put up with a bit of boring commentary first. When you first run vim, you're in what's called "normal mode". You can only enter commands here, not type text. To start typing, you have to hit i for insert. To stop typing text, you hit the escape key and you're back in normal mode. Modes are one of the huge things you have to get your head around when you first start using Vim. There are a bunch of getting started with Vim tutorials on the net, and I'll put some of those at the end of this, but the user manual, which you can get to from the help menu in macvim is a pretty good place to start. The usual things will work in macvim, cmd-q to quit, cmd-w to close a window that kind of thing. Have a quick look at the menu. So if I'm not going to tell you how to use the editor, what am I going to talk about for the rest of this article? Well, the inevitable, I'm afraid. MacVim is completely usable without question, I'm using it, and have been for a year now, but it's more than a bit quirky with Voiceover. firstly, VO will speak all characters typed in insert mode, regardless of what you have your verbosity settings set to. Trust me, as a longtime no echo person, I feel your pain. Secondly, when you arrow around in normal mode, you'll quickly realize that a blank line does not just say newline. What you'll get is "space, space, space, space . . ." etc. I have no idea why this is, as with most of these things, but I haven't found it as irritating as I expected to. Just hit down, or whatever you wanted to do next, and it'll probably get cut off by whatever VO wanted to say next, probably the next line of text. You very quickly realize that space means a newline and hit down, trust me. A side effect of this is that you really can't practically use any of the VO commands that read large chunks of text in Vim. You'll just have to highlight what you want to read, and use one of the commands to read highlighted text. If you don't know about these, I've explained them in my VO performance article. things are a little odd when scrolling through text with your arrow keys. It seems to have something to do with the way Vim itself works, but when it scrolls down a screen of text, the line won't be spoken completely, and you'll have to arrow down and back up again to hear it completely. It's kind of hard to explain, but you'll see what I mean if you play with it for a bit. It's the reason for setting the window height, the screen height and that scroll jump thing. To be honest, though, again, I've kind of gotten used to it. All errors and messages are displayed on the bottom line of the MacVim window. Unfortunately, since Leopard doesn't let you interact with individual lines of text anymore in most circumstances, you can't set a hotspot to read it automatically when it changes. This is where error bells comes in. Whenever it pops up some error like not letting you switch buffers without saving or that the editor command doesn't exist, it'll beep. Then at least you can go down to the message line and work out what the error is. You spend a lot less time going "huh?" with it turned on, or at least I found that. And the last one I'll mention here is about arrows. In vim, traditionally, you don't use arrow keys to move through text. The keys are j: down, k: up, h: left and l: right. The catch for us in Voiceover is with j and k. Only the word you arrow to will be spoken when you use them. In other words, if you're at the beginning of the line and you press j, only the first word at the beginning of the next line will be spoken. The easy answer to this, given that the normal arrow keys also seem to work, is just don't use those commands. The slightly complicated reason you *do* need to know those commands is that, when marking text to cut and paste or perform other commands, the arrow keys don't seem to work to select text. This can occasionally mean doing things like going into text selection mode, doing a search for the text at the end of the selection and going out again. This will make a lot more sense once you start working with the tutorials. Anyway, that's the really brief overview. There's a whole lot more that could be said about vim and MacVim, and probably about VO and MacVim, and I'm sure if any of the rest of you decide to give it a go and find it useful, there'll be tips to exchange. Maybe even, since this is open source, more work could be done with the accessibility layer to make this easier to use. resources: http://www.vim.org/ Use vim like a pro: http://tottinge.blogsome.com/use-vim-like-a-pro/ Efficient editing with vim: http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=.
