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February 1, 2016 Marie H.

Vim as an IDE

Vim as an IDE

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I use vim daily, and am the kind of Linux person to snicker at those using nano, pico and all the lesser editors of the world. But recently a project I was working on became a bit more complex both in size and structure that I needed vim to have a bit more umpf than just the normal powers it was providing. So I started to do some research and discuss with other developers around the world to find the best solution to me. Mainly because I haven’t jumped on the whole IDE/Eclipse movement and don’t want to lose vim as a tool.

Fortunately, it appears I am not the only person who needs/wants these functionalities in an editor and was able to find the perfect solution for me and hopefully you. Vim as an IDE gives me the flexibility of vim and the powers of auto completion and syntax highlighting without the overhead of a JVM and clunky GUI. Lets get started.

I run on a Fedora workstation so for any other distro or Windows/Mac see: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe#installation

Short demo

Here you will see a quick example of me changing a few variables and the autocompletion functionality YouCompleteMe provides.

If you haven’t already, install vim with some prerequisites.

sudo dnf install vim automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel cmake python-devel git

Depending on your os you may need to use another package manager (apt, yum, brew, etc)

Download and configure vundle

Vundle is a vim plugin management system that will help you install all the things nice and easily.

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim.git ~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim

Add the following to the top of your .vimrc

set nocompatible
filetype off

set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#begin()

Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'
Plugin 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe'

call vundle#end()
filetype plugin indent on

This is needed to complete the install Vundle as well as YouCompleteMe.

Install vundle and ycm

Now we will actually install Vundle and YouCompleteMe, YouCompleteMe is a library to add auto completion functionality to vim.

vim +PluginInstall +qall

Compile C++ libs for faster auto completion

cd ~
mkdir ycm_build
cd ycm_build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" . ~/.vim/bundle/YouCompleteMe/third_party/ycmd/cpp
cmake --build . --target ycm_support_libs --config Release

And now vim is your ide for all development purposes.