Re: Favorite Text Editor?

[sierrathedog04]

If I may add to Rhandom's question about vi, here is my related one: I use either the vim or vile variants of vi to write Perl scripts. I would love from inside the vi editor to be able to run my perl programs and see my output and errors (if any), possibly in separate windows.

But I don't know how to run my Perl scripts from inside of vi. Sometimes I fire up a shell inside vi and run my Perl script inside the shell, but that is a lot of extra typing.

Back when I used to use the Borland C++ editor I was able to run Perl scripts from inside the editor. There must be away to do so with vi. If anyone knows how then please clue me in.

Update: It is in fact easy to run a perl script while vi is editing it. You simply type the following EX editor command at the colon prompt:

!perl %

If you start your perl program off with the shebang command, then you can also use the following command instead:

!./%

[bwana147]

In the same range, I'm rather fond of the filtering feature of vim (actually, I think it's a feature of all "standard" vi's).

If you prefix the ! with a range (i.e. "%" for the whole buffer, or ".,147" for current line thru line 147, or "'a,'b" for marker a thru marker b, etc.), vi will pipe the given range into the external command that follows the bang, and replace it with the output of the same command.

Very useful for one-liners, IMHO. Example: you're editing an SQL file with zillions of INSERT statements, and want to insert a COMMIT every 500 lines, lest the rollback segments chokes under the load:

:%!perl -ple "print 'COMMIT;' unless $.\%500"

You need to escape the modulo operator, lest vi interpolates into the current buffer name

The down side is that you don't see error messages. Unless maybe you say 2>&1 (haven't tried that yet, though

--bwana147

[alfie]

You might find the :make feature of vim very useful: You can set makeprg to "perl\ -cw\ %" and use afterwards :make to check the program. This aproach offers you some nice features:
• It's easier to type
• You get the error-messages in a special buffer and can step through it. Read about this feature in :help quickfix
Another real good feature, btw :)
--
use signature; signature(" So long\nAlfie");