| |
Eclim Brings Eclipse Power To Vim
By: Taylor Gillespie
Expert Author
2011-08-18
Whether you develop in Ada, C/C++, COBOL, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, or write HTML, XML and produce DTDs or XSDs, Eclipse can benefit you. Originally designed as a Java integrated development environment, Eclipse brings code completion and validation to other languages as well. For complex applications, and especially verbose languages, an integrated development environment is a savior. Unfortunately IDEs are naturally mouse-heavy with GUIs. Many developers, myself included, use the Vim editor because of the power of the command mode; however, even using plugins to extend Vim will never bring it up to parity with the features of Eclipse. Enter Eclim, a headless Eclipse instance that acts as a server to process your code in Eclipse and return the data to Vim. You get the best of Eclipse and Vim together.
The Eclim server, eclimd can be run on the localhost to communicate with your local Vim session, or you can use it remotely with all the lag that entails. With new commands such as :ProjectCreate and :Validate bring the project organization features and code validation of Eclipse to Vim. Other commands such as :PingEclim and :EclimDisable or :EclimEnable allow you to control the Eclim server from within Vim. While code completion and validation is available for the languages that Eclipse supports, Java has the most support. Code creation tools, Ant integration, documentation search, checkstyle, and Unit testing are some of the Eclim and Eclipse Java features.
Because of its wide Java support, for a developer that uses Vim, Eclim gives the great features of a solid IDE, Eclipse to the minimalism of Vim. For a Linux developer that's looking to program on the Android platform and uses Vim, the verboseness of Java and all of its dependencies can be daunting, but having many of the features of Eclipse available makes the process more sane. The one drawback and my only compliant is the long, camel-cased commands go against the spirit of terseness in Vim-land, but at the same time remind you that you are backed by a real, feature rich development environment.
About the Author:
Taylor is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
|
|
