Month: August 2004

I have been meaning to learn some sort of image manipulation tool for quite some time. I have used the Gimp in the past when I want to scale something or convert images from one format to another but I have never had the time or inclination to sit down and learn enough of it to be reasonably confident.
I have just had a long weekend so I decided to learn it because like it or lump it, its a very handy tool in any web developers arsenal. I mainly do backend work but there are occasions when I envy the versatility of other web developers when putting together sites. If you want to have a look at the sort of stuff I mean have a look at the The Zen Garden. Some of the pages on that site are just divine.

I decided to get function folding working today and discovered that it is relatively simple to set up unless Vim isn’t detecting your filetype correctly which it wasn’t in my case.
To get basic Folding for Perl working add
let perl_fold=1
let perl_fold_blocks = 1
to your .vimrc file and then open a .pl file and you should see lots of blue lines running across the screen. These are where the folds have been made and you should see a line count similar to
+– 24 lines: sub summit_sub {——————————–
Put the cursor on this line and press “za”. This will magically unfold the line. Pressing “za” again refolds the line.
I don’t like the perl folding defaults so I dedcided to run with the manual ones but my filetype was alway wrong when working on a modules. it was inserting c-style foldmarker ie “/*}}}*/” instead of the perl foldmarker #}}}
This was easlily remedied as follows
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.pm set filetype=perl || set commentstring=#%s
I now have folding working. Now all I need to do is decide what type of folding I prefer.

I was wanting to start some comments in a large Perl module the other day and not really had to use Vim’s regexp to any great degree because I know Perl I decided to see if it could be done.
I decided to add a little bit of pod above every funcion. The following was the result Remember In vim the ^M is a control character for carriage return and can be achieved by holding down the control key and pressing carriage return.
The following regex
:%s/^sub\(.*\) {\(.*$\)/=head \1\(\)^M^MDescrition:^M^M=cut^Msub \1{\2/
changes
sub summit_sub {
stuff;
}
to
=head summit_sub()
Descrition:
=cut
sub summit_sub{
stuff;
}
The following regex
:%s/^sub\(.*\)\n{\(.*$\)/=head \1\(\)^M^MDescrition:^M^M=cut^Msub \1{\2/
changes
sub summit_sub
{
stuff;
}
to
=head summit_sub ()
Descrition:
=cut
sub summit_sub {
stuff;
}