Vim for Julia

By: DSB

Re-posted from: https://medium.com/coffee-in-a-klein-bottle/vim-for-julia-18eba071c654?source=rss-8bd6ec95ab58------2

An easy setup for Vim as Julia IDE (on Ubuntu)

As someone who has been a Vim user for years, I can confidently say that Vim is highly addictive. Once you get used to it’s shortcuts, editing code without it becomes unbearable. Although many tutorials exist on how to setup a Vim IDE for Python and other languages, no tutorial seems to be available for using Vim with Julia. So this might be a first.

By no means this article is comprehensive, I intend to present a very neat and fast way of using Vim with Julia. Note that there are many alternatives to using “pure Vim”, one can code using Juno and install the vim-mode package in Atom. The method I propose is using “pure Vim”, but with the very cool SpaceVim.

If you are new to Vim, and is trying to learn it, you probably realized that Vim has thousands of plugins available, and setting up your “IDEish” Vim may be quite complicated. One has to learn how to install plugins, choose color highlighting themes, and much more. Here is where SpaceVim comes in.

SpaceVim is a Vim distribution that works pretty much like an IDE, with some of the most popular plugins already installed. It also comes with some preset shortcuts, allowing for a more efficient file navigation. And most importantly, it looks beautiful.

Installing Vim and SpaceVim

The first thing to do is to install Vim… Well, actually, NeoVim. If you are not familiar with NeoVim, it is pretty much an updated Vim. So why use it? The only reason is that in my experience, it just works better with SpaceVim and Julia, and also, I like the cursor better. But feel free to go with Vim if you prefer it. The commands below install NeoVim and then SpaceVim.

sudo apt install neovim
curl -sLf https://spacevim.org/install.sh | bash

To access NeoVim from the terminal, you just need to write

nvim “example.txt”

If like me, you prefer to use the common “vim” command, then you can create an alias.

If you are using bash (the standard shel), open the file ~/.bashrc and write alias vim="nvim $argv".

If you are using fish, then on the terminal write

function vim
    nvim $argv
end

This will create a function called “vim” in the fish shell. Then run the command funcsave vim , to save the function so it becomes permanant.

When you run Vim for the first time after installing SpaceVim, you will note that some plugins will be installed. By the end of the installation, you might get an error message about “vimproc”. To fix this, go into the command line of Vim by typing : , then write VimProcInstall .

Example on running VimProcInstall to fix possible error messages.

Setting up Julia

To set up Julia now is incredibly simple. If a plugin is already available in the SpaceVim “ecosystem”, you just need to add that plugin to your init.toml file, which is located in your home directory inside the folder .SpaceVim.d , and SpaceVim will install it for you.

Hence, to install the packages for dealing with Julia, just open ~/.SpaceVim.d/init.toml and write the following in the end of the file

[[layer]]
name= "lang#julia"

You might also want to add

[[layer]]
name= "colorscheme"

The code above will enable different colorschemes, which can be chosen by altering the attribute colorscheme.

This is it. You now have a Vim IDE for Julia!

Example of file ~/.SpaceVim.d/init.toml — Note that the ‘autocomplete’ layer is disabled. This is due to some incompatibility between the Julia packages and the autocomplete package. At the end of this article I present a fix for this problem.

Tips on using SpaceVim

There are tons of tutorials on how to use Vim, so I will not go into that. But there is not as much information on using SpaceVim. So I’ll give you some tips on how to get started.

  • Installing Plugins: I’ve already talked about how to install different plugins. You just have to pretty much add a layer to your init.toml file. Here is a list of the available plugins for SpaceVim;
  • Navigating file: the NerdTree plugin is already shipped with SpaceVim, so one just needs to press F3 to open the navigation menu. You can press l to go inside a folder, or h to go out of the folder;
  • <Leader> and SPC: If you read the documentation of SpaceVim, you will likely encounter shortcuts such as SPC <Tab> . The SPC stands for “space bar”. The <Leader> default key is \ ;
  • Commenting line: To comment a line, just do SPC c l (space bar + c +l), and SPC c l ;
  • Copy to system clipboad: A common difficulty to people starting with Vim is the fact that you cannot easily copy text from Vim to a another file not opened on the same Vim window (e.g your Browser). SpaceVim solves this to you, just use <Leader> y to copy to your system clipboard, and <Leader> p ;
  • Moving from Buffers (tabs): If you are working on a file, then press F3 and open another file, a new buffer will become active. You can then press SPC <Tab> to change buffers, therefore, easily going from one file to another. Amazingly, the buffers will be shown on the top of Vim, and you can actually just click on them if you want (but if you are using Vim, you probably don’t want to be using your mouse).
Image showing the different buffers of files opened.

If you like this article or has suggestions on how it could be improved, consider “Clapping” or leaving a comment, so I can get some feedback.

UPDATE: When using SpaceVim with Julia autocompletion, you might experience some freezing when pressing the Tab . This is due some incompatibility between the julia-vim package and the other autocompletion packages present on SpaceVim. To solve this issue, you may disable the Latex unicode tab command in the julia-vim package. To do this, open the file ~./SpaceVim/autoload/SpaceVim/layers/lang/julia.vim . And disable the following command.

let g:latex_to_unicode_tab = 0

Vim for Julia was originally published in Coffee in a Klein Bottle on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.