Hi Yvonne, Thank you for this, I am going to save this E-Mail so that I can read it properly.
TC James On 17 Nov 2009, at 21:24, Yvonne Thomson wrote: > Hi > > Ok, first, I'm not actually sure if what you downloaded is the right version > of macvim, since I didn't even *know* it was on sourceforge. The first thing > I'd do is go to > http://code.google.com/p/macvim/wiki/Snapshot > and download the latest snapshot from there. > > Secondly, I'll paste in an article about Macvim that I wrote a while ago that > talks about using it with Voiceover. As I said, I wrote it a little while ago > now, but I've reread it, and it's still pretty useful, I think. Feel free to > ask me any more questions, though. > > Home Page: http://code.google.com/p/macvim/ > > So, you're a Voiceover user on the endless hunt for a good text editor. You > might be a programmer like me, or someone who does desktop publishing in > Latex or you just want to write text and don't need all the bells and > whistles of a word processor. But there's a problem. Most of the text editors > everyone raves about in OS X are completely unusable. For whatever reason, > the built in text editing interface in OS X just doesn't seem to want to do > what text editor authors want it to do, and so heavy hitters like BBedit and > Textmate and even aquamacs, the GUI version of Emacs, just don't work for us. > > There are alternatives. Smultron, SubEthaEdit even textedit, but for me at > least, they're not quite good enough. They either don't have enough > programming features, or the ones they do have take a lot of scripting. And > so, we come to MacVim. > > As the name suggests, MacVim is a cocoa port of an existing editor, Vim, > which has a pretty long history in the unix world and, in fact, is built into > OS X without you downloading anything as a terminal application. MacVim is a > lot better than this, since, being a GUI OS X application, you can open files > in it from finder, a lot of the familiar OS X keystrokes work, you have > access to the clipboard and so on. > > Vim, however, has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not really like any > other editor you've ever used, and so if you don't find, say, textedit > lacking in features, you should probably go no further. But if you're up for > some adventure, and don't mind doing a bit of fiddling to get your > environment the way you want it, keep reading. > > The first thing to do, after you've downloaded this, is create a file in your > home directory called ".vimrc". You'll probably want to use another text > editor to do this, and it might warn you that this is a hidden file when you > try to save it, but to get the most out of MacVim with VO, this is essential. > > In the file, cut and paste these settings > set winheight=10 > set lines=50 > set virtualedit+=onemore > set scrolljump=10 > set errorbells > > No, these aren't the only settings you'll ever need, but they'll make using > it with VO a lot more comfortable. > > Now that you've created this file, you can actually run MacVim. What you'll > see, is a fairly ordinary application: edit area, toolbar, menu. The first > odd thing will be, it looks like your edit area's full of tilde characters. > You can safely ignore these. They're not actually *in* your file, they're > what Vim displays when it has nothing to display. In other words, it's > telling you you're in an empty file, and you'll probably never think about > them again for the rest of the time you use the editor. > > I'm presuming at this point that you know nothing about Vim. If you do, > you'll have to put up with a bit of boring commentary first. When you first > run vim, you're in what's called "normal mode". You can only enter commands > here, not type text. > > To start typing, you have to hit i for insert. > > To stop typing text, you hit the escape key and you're back in normal mode. > Modes are one of the huge things you have to get your head around when you > first start using Vim. There are a bunch of getting started with Vim > tutorials on the net, and I'll put some of those at the end of this, but the > user manual, which you can get to from the help menu in macvim is a pretty > good place to start. > > The usual things will work in macvim, cmd-q to quit, cmd-w to close a window > that kind of thing. Have a quick look at the menu. > > So if I'm not going to tell you how to use the editor, what am I going to > talk about for the rest of this article? Well, the inevitable, I'm afraid. > MacVim is completely usable without question, I'm using it, and have been for > a year now, but it's more than a bit quirky with Voiceover. > firstly, VO will speak all characters typed in insert mode, regardless of > what you have your verbosity settings set to. Trust me, as a longtime no echo > person, I feel your pain. > > Secondly, when you arrow around in normal mode, you'll quickly realize that a > blank line does not just say newline. What you'll get is "space, space, > space, space . . ." etc. I have no idea why this is, as with most of these > things, but I haven't found it as irritating as I expected to. Just hit down, > or whatever you wanted to do next, and it'll probably get cut off by whatever > VO wanted to say next, probably the next line of text. You very quickly > realize that space means a newline and hit down, trust me. > > A side effect of this is that you really can't practically use any of the VO > commands that read large chunks of text in Vim. > You'll just have to highlight what you want to read, and use one of the > commands to read highlighted text. If you don't know about these, I've > explained them in my VO performance article. > > things are a little odd when scrolling through text with your arrow keys. It > seems to have something to do with the way Vim itself works, but when it > scrolls down a screen of text, the line won't be spoken completely, and > you'll have to arrow down and back up again to hear it completely. > > It's kind of hard to explain, but you'll see what I mean if you play with it > for a bit. It's the reason for setting the window height, the screen height > and that scroll jump thing. To be honest, though, again, I've kind of gotten > used to it. > > All errors and messages are displayed on the bottom line of the MacVim > window. Unfortunately, since Leopard doesn't let you interact with individual > lines of text anymore in most circumstances, you can't set a hotspot to read > it automatically when it changes. This is where error bells comes in. > Whenever it pops up some error like not letting you switch buffers without > saving or that the editor command doesn't exist, it'll beep. Then at least > you can go down to the message line and work out what the error is. You spend > a lot less time going "huh?" with it turned on, or at least I found that. > > And the last one I'll mention here is about arrows. In vim, traditionally, > you don't use arrow keys to move through text. The keys are j: down, k: up, > h: left and l: right. > > The catch for us in Voiceover is with j and k. Only the word you arrow to > will be spoken when you use them. In other words, if you're at the beginning > of the line and you press j, only the first word at the beginning of the next > line will be spoken. > > The easy answer to this, given that the normal arrow keys also seem to work, > is just don't use those commands. The slightly complicated reason you *do* > need to know those commands is that, when marking text to cut and paste or > perform other commands, the arrow keys don't seem to work to select text. > This can occasionally mean doing things like going into text selection mode, > doing a search for the text at the end of the selection and going out again. > This will make a lot more sense once you start working with the tutorials. > > Anyway, that's the really brief overview. There's a whole lot more that could > be said about vim and MacVim, and probably about VO and MacVim, and I'm sure > if any of the rest of you decide to give it a go and find it useful, there'll > be tips to exchange. Maybe even, since this is open source, more work could > be done with the accessibility layer to make this easier to use. > > resources: > http://www.vim.org/ > Use vim like a pro: http://tottinge.blogsome.com/use-vim-like-a-pro/ > Efficient editing with vim: http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=.
