Vim7

Well, I didn't have the time to figure out exactely what went wrong, especially as the input was only broken for users other than myself. Anyhow, during the afternoon I had to attend a couple of talks at the institute. Okay had to sounds harsh, I would have gone there anyway as it is always interesting to get an insight into the research other people at the institute do. Slightly annoying though was the too small room (people had to sit on the floor) and as a result of this the really bad air — despite the opened windows. After successfully picking up a headache – and of course interesting and well done talks – I tried to resolve this vim problem.

The first two signs of catastrophe were actually easy to handle, I forgot to append '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' to src/feature.h. And as a result it didn't read the configuration in /etc/vimrc. That's why I ended up with a different input behaviour, actually, with the vi-compatible input behaviour. While figuring that out (and compiling vim approximately 10 times to get these stupid X-dependency resolved) I remembered to check for patches, too. I have no clue if this in the end was responsible for resolving the problem, but after applying all available patches, there was no X dependency left. Great. Now I have a working vim 7.0.66.

Any advantages? Well, one which actually made me install it. When using 'set number' – to get the line number printed in front of each line – the width that is used for the numbers is now smaller than in the older version, thus wasting less space; have a look at the picture further down and see the difference. I very rarely have source code files with more than a couple of hundert lines, so I do not need space for a 7 digit line number. And matching brackets are now highlighted by default. Other than that I am not aware of any specific advantages, but apparantly there are some. The spellchecking sounds like something I would like to get set-up for emailing, want to do that for a long time already.

Back home in the evening I noticed that the button which turns down the volume on the laptop doesn't work that well anymore, it requires a very specific style of pressing before it cares to react. Slightly annoying. But okay, I guess I can live with that and do not need a new laptop.

Today continued with a bunch of talks, this time in the morning. And eight instead of six. But they were shorter. And I was sitting next to the window, so I had fresh air supply. Hence no headache, yay! I actually also managed to get some work done during the afternoon and found out a good way get the syntax highlighting in vim highlight what I want. But despite of this, there is another reason why today was a good day: I only got slightly wet in the rain, sometimes having an umbrella indeed comes in handy.