2010-03-10

Running Vim from Lazarus IDE

I would like to edit my program both in Lazarus IDE and Vim. Lazarus IDE is good, but Vim is faster for hard core text processing. Thanks to both of them, this task is easy.

First step is to launch Lazarus IDE, and selecting "Configure external tools ..." from the "Tools" menu.




Next step is trivial, just adding a new entry by clicking "Add".


In the final step, type the following information into specified fields.

Title: Edit with Vim

Program File Name: C:\PortableApps\PortableApps\gVimPortable\gVimPortable.exe

Parameters: +$Row() "$EdFile()"

Working Directory: $Path()

+$Row() allows Vim to directly locate the cursor when the file is opened so that you can keep going on, very useful for large files.

"$EdFile()" is the full path to the file. Note that this will work even though you have a single file on Lazarus, not a project. (If you want that, there are options for that too.)

$Path() is the working directory of the file. It will be useful to locate that directory so that you can easily open more files from Vim.


After all, your final screen should look like this:




You can now open a file from Lazarus IDE in Vim as follows:




Note that you should have a file opened it must be saved to appear in Vim.