Vim Qt GUI

equalsraf

Scratching my own curiosity and trying to avoid some of gVIM's annoying glitches, I implemented a Qt GUI for VIM. It is still rough around the edges, but it is good enough to write its own code :D. Lots of bugs to fix(mostly graphical glitches), so feel free to poke me if you find some.

Repository and build instructions:

And here is a peek:
!http://media.raf.im/vim.png(Screenshot)!

leon.anavi

Well done :) curiosity moves things ahead :)

rajitsingh

Been using it for a few days, and it's become my primary text editor. A few questions, though:

Does it not support colored synatx highligting for QML and javascript?
Does it have the .vimrc file? I tried looking for it to permanently change the color scheme, but couldn't find it in my home dir.
Is that color scheme you are using in the screen shot 'slate'?

equalsraf

I'll answer in reverse order, since the first question is the hardest:

The color scheme is called slate2 https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/colors/slate2.vim
You need to create a new .vimrc, it won't be created by default
It should support coloured syntax (the same as regular Vim). It may be having problems loading the correct syntax. Have you tried syntax manually in the "Syntax" menu?

Concerning 1) Vim tries to load the colour definitions from the Vim shared folders. Its ability to find them depends on the flags given to ./configure. In what system are you running this? Do you have another version of Vim installed?

rajitsingh

@equalsraf
I'm running it on Chakra. GVim was installed earlier, but installing QVim removed it as it was conflicting. Will try the tricks you mentioned. Thanks man!

rajitsingh

@equalsraf
Also, I can add the tabs bar, but when I try to drag it and reposition it just above the editor area, it just disappears and gets disabled.

equalsraf

@rajitsingh
If are building from source, you can keep GVim, and use only the compiled executable. As long they were both compiled with the same configure options, they will share the configuration files.

./configure ...<options must match the gvim package --prefix etc>
make
./vim -g

The tabbar is another issue, I'll fix it later.

giddie

Awww; thank you! This is a really exciting project. I find that the QVim window responds to resizing much better than GVim, apart from anything else. It feel significantly more responsive.

I'd love to see this merged into Vim proper. I'm hoping the ball is already rolling for this? Are there any big bugs that still need ironing out?

equalsraf

@giddie

The resizing handling is actually one the main reasons I got started with this :D.

No ball rolling yet. I need to get this stabilised first.

I'm still filling up bug reports :D. https://code.google.com/p/vim-qt/issues/list The most serious issue right now is in autoconf, this thing sort of builds by miracle. In more esoteric systems it has issues detecting the Qt libraries

rajitsingh

Just submitted 2 new issues to that list. Thanks for your great work!

trusktr

Hi! I too am interested in doing something similar. Where can I find coumentation on how to connect a GUI to vim?

equalsraf

There isn't a lot of written docs about it, other than the Vim source code itself.
There are a few places you have a look at:

The best place to start looking at code is inside the gui_* files (gui_gtk_x11.c and gui_mac.c) you would have to create a file replacing those functions
http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration
If you do a search on Github there are a number of unofficial GUIs around - the iOS one is probably the latest
There is vim-qt at https://bitbucket.org/equalsraf/vim-qt/wiki/Home
Feel free to ask away, you can also find me at ##vim_qt in freenode