VIM IDE deployment

What is this?

My attempt to have VIM as my main Integrated Development Enviroment.

Motivation

After having VSCode consume 15Gb of RAM for working with a C++ project, I had to find a more lightweight alternative. I need control of my tools to have control ver the quality of my work as a professional software developer.

Advantages

• Open-source.
• Battle tested.
• Highly customizable.
• Well documented.
• Amazing community.
• I already use in a day to day basis.
• Lightweight.

Disadvantages

• Difficult to learn at first.
• No magic, you get what you put on it.
• Requires understanding the whole development process.

Instalation

First you need neovim installed. This can be achieved several ways, using the default packet manager of your distribution, snap or pip. I prefer to go to the github repository and download the appimage.

The one liner to install the latest stable drop:

wget https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/stable/nvim.appimage && \
    chmod u+x nvim.appimage && \
    sudo mv nvim.appimage /usr/bin/vim

The next step is to clone this repository at $HOME/.config/nvim:

git clone https://github.com/jairomer/neovim-config.git $HOME/.config/nvim && \
    cd $HOME/.config/nvim && \
    git submodule update --init --recursive

Then, you might want to install the YouCompleteMe to have autocompletion on several programming languages:

cd $HOME/.config/nvim && python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade pynvim && python bundle/YouCompleteMe/install.py

There are several ways of installing this plugin that can be checked out at the README of YouCompleteMe.

C++ Autocomplete and linting

It is needed to configure each C++ project in order for autocomplete to work with c++17 and beyond. YouCompleteMe uses clangd as backend for the implementation of the language server. This means that if further flags are needed, they must be explictly defined on a custom .ycm_extra_conf.py such as the following:

import os
import os.path
import fnmatch
import logging
import ycm_core
import re


def getIncludesUnder(father):
    return [str("-I"+x[0]) for x in os.walk(father)]

def Settings( **kwargs ):
  BASE_FLAGS = [
          '-Wall',
          '-Wextra',
          '-Werror',
          '-Wno-long-long',
          '-Wno-variadic-macros',
          '-fexceptions',
          '-ferror-limit=10000',
          '-DNDEBUG',
          '-std=c++20',
          '-xc++',
          '-I/usr/lib/',
          '-I/usr/include/',
          ]
  BASE_FLAGS += getIncludesUnder(os.getcwd()+"/src")
  BASE_FLAGS += getIncludesUnder(os.getcwd()+"/3pp")
  return {
    'flags': BASE_FLAGS,
  }

Semantic completion and static analysis

Install and configure the latest versions for libclang and clang-tidy for your current distribution.

Enclosing of parenthesis, brackets, etc

For this I simply use delimitMate.

To enable it, we need to execute make all and make install.

Tmux

Tmux is a teminal multiplexer that enables multitasking on your workflow. It also provides a way of keeping several terminals active on remote servers, which is very useful when the internet connection fails.

Tmux can be downloaded and compiled from (here)[https://github.com/tmux/tmux].

To setup the tmux configuration file:

cp tmux.conf ~/.tmux.conf

PlantUML configuration

I followed this tutorial.

Now you can use Plantuml* commands inside vim.