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 highlighting on syntax on
Other Useful vimrc settings
" show a ruler with line number, % through file on status line set ruler " show line number set nu " PHP syntax check set makeprg=php\ -l\ % set errorformat=%m\ in\ %f\ on\ line\ %l
During development, you will probably often find yourself typing print_object($foo) and die(). The following lines is vimrc create a keystroke to make this faster
" F5 put a Moodle debugging msg map <F5> oprint_object(); die(); // DONOTCOMMIT<Esc>23hi
File encoding and decoding
set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,gbk,big5,latin1
set termencoding=utf-8,gbk
if has ('multi_byte') && v:version > 601
if v:lang =~? '^\(zh\)\|\(ja\)\|\(ko\)'
set ambiwidth=double
endif
endif
Status Line
set statusline=%<%f\ %h%m%r%=%k[%{(&fenc==\"\")?&enc:&fenc}%{(&bomb?\",BOM\":\"\")}]\ %-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P
Ctags
See the Ctags Article for details on how to setup ctags usage with moodle and vim
Examples in the wild
Eloy Lafuente (stronk7)
https://gist.github.com/stronk7/b0624e66e150ff4ed28c0278f7e1d601
