Using vim –servername feature for fun and profit

… or any other document format for that matter. I thought it might be nice to have some sort of split window view in that allows you to edit a Pandoc file on the left and see the generated I-D on the right (in vim, with no extra daemons and not relying on inotify). Turns out you can do that, though it is not optimal, but it works. The jury is still out if this works well enough to actually make it useful.

I like Vim, so I try to use it at many places. Like in my shell (set -o vi), and when writing and coding. After some Googling I found that Vim can also be used as a MANPAGER. But there is one nagging issue. To quit viewing the manual page you have to type ‘:q’, which is one keystroke more then when using less as your MANPAGER… Needless to say: this is unacceptable.

I’m a huge fan of syntax highlighting in my editor Vim. One thing I started to miss was that user defined type miss out on the highlighting, because Vim does not know about them. Wouldn’t it be cool to have some sort of automatic support that detect your types and adds them to the correct highlighting group? I call this “dynamic syntax highlighting”. As a proof-of-concept I took the tagbar plugin, and modified it a little to take advantage of the language detection (specifically the types).