Janus: Vim Distribution

This is a distribution of plug-ins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.

It is designed to provide minimal working environment using the most popular plug-ins and the most common mappings.

The distribution is completely customisable using a ~/.vimrc.before and ~/.vimrc.after Vim RC files.

Updating to the latest version

To update to the latest version of the distribution, just run rake inside your ~/.vim directory.

NOTE: If you ever have an error updating Janus relating to a missing commit in a submodule, please try running rake again before submitting an issue.

Mailing list

The mailing list is hosted at Google Groups, please join it for discussion and announcements.

Pre-requisites

The distribution is designed to work with Vim >= 7.3.

The distribution also requires ack, ctags, git, ruby and rake. For the most comfortable experience, use the GUI version of Vim. Linux users should install gvim, OSX users should install MacVim. The recommended way of installing MacVim is using Homebrew, but before installing MacVim you need to use system-wide Python (If you are using python that is):

If you're using pythonbrew: do pythonbrew off

$ brew install macvim

If you don't use Homebrew, you can still download MacVim here.

Take a look at the Pre-requisites wiki page for more information.

Installation

To install Janus, please use our automatic installer , which backs up any Vim files found in your home folder and installs Janus.

$ curl -L https://bit.ly/janus-bootstrap | bash

Customization

You can use ~/.gvimrc.before and ~/.vimrc.before for settings Janus itself uses, such as the leader setting. You may also use ~/.gvimrc.after and ~/.vimrc.after for any additional settings; it is also a good place for overriding Janus settings, as both files will be loaded at the end of Janus.

For example, to override the default color schemes:

$ echo 'color desert'  >> ~/.vimrc.after
$ echo 'color molokai' >> ~/.gvimrc.after

If you want to do additional customization or add more Vim plugins, create a ~/.janus directory and add your plugins there, either with a git clone or by adding submodules to your own git repository there. This directory is treated like a normal pathogen directory. For example:

$ cd ~/.janus
$ git clone https://github.com/vim-scripts/Rename2.git rename2

Or, if you have a git repository in ~/.janus, you can use a submodule:

$ cd ~/.janus
$ git submodule add https://github.com/vim-scripts/Rename2.git rename2

If you would like to disable an included plug-in, you can do that with the janus#disable_plugin() function from inside your ~/.vimrc.before. This function takes a plug-in name as an argument without the group. For example, if you would like to disable the NERDCommenter plug-in, you can do that with the command:

$ echo "call janus#disable_plugin('nerdcommenter')" >> ~/.vimrc.before

WARNING: We've noticed over and over, that people fork Janus just to customize it. This is bad practice for several reasons and you should not do that, and here's why:

Janus is fully customisable and there's no need to change the core for using a different plugin fork or using a different mapping.
Forking means maintenance; maintenance means burden. Do not burden yourself with maintaining a fork; that's what the ~/.janus folder is for.

If you find yourself needing a customisation that is not possible with the current setup, then please open an issue or consider submitting a pull request to make it possible to continue using/improving the official repo.

WARNING: Any uncommited files inside the janus folder will be removed the next time you run rake so make sure to either put them in the custom folder (~/.janus), or commit them. We clean the janus folder in case we replace a manually installed plugin (using rake tasks) with a submodule.

For more information on how to customize Janus, you might want to take a look at the Customization wiki page. Additional you can see Example of customization.

Intro to VIM

Here're some tips in case you've never used VIM before:

Tutorials

Type vimtutor into a shell to go through a brief interactive tutorial inside VIM.
Watch this presentation at VIM: Walking Without Crutches or read the slides on Speaker Deck.
Watch the screencasts at vimcasts.org
Watch Derek Wyatt's energetic tutorial videos at his site
Read wycats' perspective on learning Vim at Everyone who tried to convince me to use vim was wrong
Read this and other answers to a question about vim at StackOverflow: Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi
Read the Getting Started with Vim tutorial on SitePoint
Read the Effective Rails Development with Vim tutorial on SitePoint

Modes

VIM has three modes:
- insert mode- stuff you type is added to the buffer
- normal mode- keys you hit are interpreted as commands
- visual mode- allows you to select blocks of text
To enter insert mode, hit i
To exit insert mode, hit <ESC>
To enter visual mode, hit v
To exit visual mode, hit <ESC>

Useful commands

Use :q to exit vim
Certain commands are prefixed with a <Leader> key, which maps to \ by default. You can, for example, use let mapleader = "," to change this to a comma. If you want this to be in effect for uses of <Leader> in the .vimrc file, make sure to define this in ~/.vimrc.before
Keyboard cheat sheet.

Features

This Vim distribution includes a number of packages built by others.

Base Customizations

Janus ships with a number of basic customizations for vim:

Line numbers
Ruler (line and column numbers)
No wrap (turn off per-buffer via :set wrap)
Soft 2-space tabs, and default hard tabs to 2 spaces
Show trailing whitespace as .
Make searching highlighted, incremental, and case insensitive unless a capital letter is used
Always show a status line
Allow backspacing over everything (indentations, eol, and start characters) in insert mode
<C-P> inserts the directory of the current file into a command
Automatically resize splits when resizing the Vim window (GUI only)
<leader>ew expands to :e (directory of current file)/ (open in the current buffer)
<leader>es expands to :sp (directory of current file)/ (open in a horizontal split)
<leader>ev expands to :vsp (directory of current file)/ (open in a vertical split)
<leader>et expands to :tabe (directory of current file)/ (open in a new tab)
Write a privileged file with :SudoW or :SudoWrite, it will prompt for sudo password when writing
<F4> toggles paste mode
<leader>fef formats the entire file
<leader>u converts the entire word to uppercase
<leader>l converts the entire word to lowercase
<leader>U converts the first char of a word to uppercase
<leader>L converts the first char of a word to lowercase
<leader>cd changes the path to the active buffer's file
<leader>md creates the directory of the active buffer's file (For example, when editing a new file for which the path does not exist.)
gw swaps the current word with the following word
<leader>ul underlines the current line with =
<leader>tw toggles wrap
<leader>fc finds the next conflict marker (tested with Git conflicted files)
Remap <Down> and <Up> to gj and gk (Wrapped text is not considered a single long line of text.)
<leader>hs toggles highlight search
<leader>= adjusts viewports to the same size (<C-w>=)
<A-[ (<D-[ on MacVim) shifts current line or selected lines rightwards
<A-] (<D-] on MacVim) shifts current line or selected lines leftwards
<C-W>! invokes kwbd plugin; it closes all open buffers in the open windows but keeps the windows open

Use <Leader>n to toggle NERDTree
Ignore compiled ruby, python, and java files
When opening vim with vim /path, open the lef

Janus

Install / Use

README