The key (for me) to editing Clojure code in Vim is a combination of two plugins, VimClojure and slime.vim (see associated blog post). One of the difficult things is that slime.vim doesn’t actually exist anywhere on vim.org’s list of scripts, so it has to be downloaded from the aforementioned blog post. Stick it in the ~/.vim/plugins directory to install it.

First, VimClojure. I tend not to use Nailgun at all, some people like it, I don’t. So instead of the regular install for vimclojure, I copy over the files from the autoload, doc, ftdetect, ftplugin, indent and syntax folders to their respective Vim folders. If you think you’ll want the Nailgun functionality, you should use the installation instructions provided by Kotarak.

Now, add the settings you need for VimClojure to your .vimrc:

" Settings for VimClojure
let g:clj_highlight_builtins=1      " Highlight Clojure's builtins
let g:clj_paren_rainbow=1           " Rainbow parentheses'!

I have to say, rainbow parentheses’ is one of the best features of vimclojure, making it easy to see exactly what parentheses closes which statement:

Now that VimClojure is set up, time to set up the integration with Clojure’s REPL, to do that I use slime.vim. Slime.vim uses screen to send the input from your editor to any window in a running screen session, so to get started we’ll have to start up a screen session. To make it easier, you can name it something so you don’t have to look up the pid, I’ll call this session “clojure”:

‹ ~ › : screen -S clojure

If you didn’t name your session, or forgot what you named it, you can use screen -ls to look up all the screen sessions you’ve started:

‹ ~ › : screen -ls
There are screens on:
41837.clojure (Attached)
8970.ttys000.Xanadu (Attached)
8990.ttys001.Xanadu (Attached)
9010.ttys002.Xanadu (Attached)
4 Sockets in /tmp/screens/S-hinmanm.


Now, start a REPL in the screen terminal window (use ‘clj’ or ‘lein REPL’ or however you like to start a Clojure REPL). Next, open a clojure file with Vim, highlight a block of code (slime.vim will automatically select a paragraph if your cursor is in the middle of something like a defn), now, press Control-c + Control-c (Ctrl+c twice in a row). You should be prompted by Vim like this:

Enter the name of the screen term, if you named your session “clojure” you’d enter “clojure”, if you didn’t name it, use the pid number you see from the output of ‘screen -ls’, next it will ask for which window to send the output to:

If you’ve used screen before (and I’m assuming you have), this is the window number your REPL is running on. After you enter this information the plugin will send the paragraph/line of text to the REPL. From here on the session id and window will be cached, so hitting ctrl+c,ctrl+c again will immediately send whatever function the cursor is on to the REPL. You can also select a block of code using visual mode and use ctrl+c,ctrl+c to send everything selected to the REPL. If you used the wrong numbers, use ctrl+c,v (Control+c, then v) to have slime.vim ask you for the numbers again.

There you go, you now have a 1-way pipe from your Vim editor to any kind of REPL (be it Clojure, Ruby or Python). Here’s a couple of screenshots of the plugin in action:

I know this doesn’t even come close to the amount of integration the Emacs has using SLIME, but for me, this is exactly what I want out of a Clojure development environment, develop some code and be able to easily send it to a REPL. Hopefully a Vim user or two out there will find this setup useful.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in my full Vim setup for some reason, you can check it out here.

UPDATE 2: Want to automagically fold Clojure methods when using Vim? Check out this post.

Here’s how to fetch it from source, patch it and build it yourself on OSX (tested on 10.5.3). First we need to check out the source:

shell> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/screen co screen

Next, we need to manually apply the patches from MacPorts (assuming you’ve used MacPorts before). First change into the screen directory and apply the following 3 patches:

shell> cd screen/src
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-maxargs
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-windowsize
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-pty.c

(Each of those should be on one line, I had to split them up to make the wrapping better).

Now, configure using the same method as the macports:

shell> ./configure --enable-locale --enable-telnet --enable-colors256 --enable-rxct_osc

From there, you should be able to do a make and make install to get your screen up and running. Vertical-split is bound to ctrl+a – |  (control-a and pipe) (substitute whatever your bind key is for ctrl+a). Then you can use ctrl+a – :resize <x> to resize the window, where <x> is x%, -x, +x or x. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Anyone that might have read my blog for a long time might remember this post about how I do GTD (Getting To Done) on my machine(s). Well, I decided it’s been quite a while since I’ve talked about that, so I’ll go through some of my workflow, tools and quirks.

If you read my blog soley for security content, you can skip this post Personally I like to read other people’s workflows/setup to see if there is an interesting way I can fit useful tools into my own setup. Anyhow, on with the details

I have 3 machines that I primarily use. My main machine is a MacBook Pro with an attached Dell LCD monitor running OSX (what else?), the second machine is a Dell Optiplex tower running Ubuntu 8.04. The third machine is a Dell 610 laptop that dual-boots Hex and Windows. Here’s a picture of my default setup on the machines:

OSX

Ubuntu

Hex

Most of my work is done on the MacBook (my personal machine, not supplied by work), I use the Ubuntu machine for tasks that span multiple days, so I can leave a screen term logged in and attach/detach whenever I need to take my laptop home. The Hex machine is mainly used for security purposes, packet analysis, nsm-console development testing, etc.

I like to keep a pretty clean desktop, clutter really tends to irritate me. I try as hard as I can to separate everything that would be on the desktop into either a “papers”, “media”, “code” or “misc” folder. In the previous post about GTD, I mentioned that we use the Mantis ticketing system to keep track of administration tickets. We still use Mantis, just recently upgraded, you can check out a shot here:

If my firefox looks a little strange, it’s because I use the vimperator extension to give firefox Vim-like keybindings and layout. It helps someone who spends a large amount of time in a vim editor to transition quickly between text editing and web-browsing. Speaking of text editing, I absolutely love MacVim and really recommend it to anyone using OSX who likes Vim:

I’ve also transitioned from Mutt to Thunderbird, mostly because Mutt’s 2-way IMAP settings are not so great if you have to check mail between multiple computers. I use the pre-release muttator extension to give Thunderbird mutt-like keybindings:

I use the standard GTD folder naming, which mostly consists of “Inbox”, “Archive” and “Do” folders. (I hope the idea behind each folder is obvious). I still use Gmail for personal email, but can’t access it from inside the work network over POP3 or IMAP due to firewall restrictions, so I use the web client.

Instead of using iCal for meetings, like I was doing, I moved to using Google Calendar, which is aided by the notifier for events, so I don’t have to set up reminders for meetings. It also lets me share my wife’s calendar and see what she’s up to As well as google calendar, I also use gReader to browse my 222 RSS subscriptions, nothing else comes close as far as I’m concerned (yay more vim-like keybindings).

I do still use a moleskine, but lately I’ve transitioned to the next larger notebook (5′ x 7′), so that I can write out larger notes and more information (writting assembly notation in a tiny notebook gets annoying). I make use of the same sort of TODO list as in my last post ( – for an incomplete task, + for a completed task ). I take it to all meetings I go to and doodle in it sometimes I still use the smaller book for lists and small notes.

One of the things I’ve found is that despite having a widescreen 2nd monitor, the ‘wide’ part doesn’t really help any for what I do, so I flipped the monitor up to make it vertical, which is really helpful for using IDA, since I can see more instructions at once, here’s the malware I’ve working on at the moment:

Since I normally have at least 1 VM running, as well as mail, 1 or 2 browsers, X11, Adium, MacVim and any other number of things, I cut down on RAM usage by using cmus (hurray more vim keybindings) for a music playing instead of iTunes (which is such a memory hog for simple things). I also use irssi instead of a graphical client for IRC since it’s a little lighter weight:

I rigged Quicksilver up to the cmus-remote command-line utility so I can have system-wide keybindings for player control, pretty much the other thing I use iTunes for anymore is heavy music folder management (I do like that feature). I spend a great deal of time at the command-line, if you’re interested in configuration files, you can find my zshrc, screenrc, vimrc, gvimrc and nsmcrc at dotfiles.org.

Finally, here’s an overview of my basic whole-desktop setup:

My GTD process has kind of evolved into a stripped down version of the multiple-step instructions from some of the more famous practitioners (receive email, process until inbox has 0 messages, perform actions). I make up a large amount of time by unifying my tools around a certain look and feel (Vim-keybindings for everything), allowing my brain not to have to shift gears for different tasks. By keeping a strict set of rules on which application goes where (as in for virtual spaces), I always know where I can find what I am looking for (application wise). In my opinion, this adds to my efficiency more than any particular tool could have.

Well, that’s about it, hopefully you found something interesting in this post. If you have a neat tool or helpful suggestion, leave a comment below (especially if it has Vim keybindings )