Blayne Sucks

I just thought that I would give some praise to two vim plugins that I absolutely adore. The first is one that I’ve been using since college called SuperTab. This was something that my Computer Architecture project group found very useful in modifying the VHDL files that were automatically generated by Cadence. There were many long, long variable names used in those that were a huge pain to have to type out. SuperTab made editing those files far easier than it could have been without. It’s also allowed me to use adequately descriptive variable names in my other programming projects where I would otherwise have been tempted to use something that was faster to type.

The next plugin is called taglist. I found this to be really useful in larger programming projects, usually when there were single files consisting of thousands of lines of code. It allows you to bring up a window with a list of the various tags in the file you’re editing. This requires that the exuberant ctags program is installed on your machine. You can jump to the various functions and variables by switching over to that window and pressing ‘enter’ on the one to which you want to jump. It’s quite nice when you have 15 functions and they are spread out over a 1500 line code file. I tend to find myself either searching repeatedly or slowly scrolling up and down to find the spot I want to go to when I don’t have taglist available. It really makes a difference. The taglist project also has its own webpage if you’re interested.

For those of you who use Gentoo Linux, like me, these plugins are both in portage and waiting for you to emerge them.