Setting up ViM

Setting up Vim for Moodle Development

There are many powerful features available in vim, here are a few tips to ensure you get powerful use out of vim with moodle development

Indentation

Moodle Coding Guidelines state that indentation should be spaces of 4 spaces (not Tabs). Some .vimrc options will help you adhere to these guidelines with ease:

" insert space characters whenever the tab key is presse
set expandtab

" insert 4 spaces characters when tab key is pressed
set tabstop=4

" insert 4 spaces wen autoindent indents
set shiftwidth=4

" automatically indent files
set autoindent

" Do smart indentation depending on code syntax (e.g. change after { }, keywords etc)
set smartindent

Syntax Highlighting

Recent versions of vim have robust syntax highlighting for php. In order to switch syntax highlighting on add the following to your .vimrc:

" set syntax highliging on
syntax on

Ctags

See the Ctags Article for details on how to setup ctags usage with moodle and vim