blog dot kam

Ever heard about rails.vim project? “Accept no imitations: rails.vim is the one true Vim plugin for syntax highlighing, easy navigation, and script invocation for all your Ruby on Rails applications, transparently and unobtrusively” says creator Tim Pope.

The very good “rails.vim” guide can be found here or just by reading project’s vimdoc here.

PROBLEM:

There is however one gotcha for Ubuntu Hardy Heron lovers (or other modern Linux distros). Using rails.vim would result in VIM “segmentation fault”crashes similar to:

Vim: Caught deadly signal ABRT
Vim: Finished.
Aborted

REASON:

This is due to the fact that a packaged VIM that comes from some Linux distros repositories has old patches.

SOLUTION:

One of possible solutions would be to download most current VIM sources from http://www.vim.org/sources.php and compile/install it manually. Below is how it is done on Ubuntu (but should be pretty similar on any Linux distro):

1. Get vim sources:

wget ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/vim-7.1.tar.bz2

(where ‘7.1′ is the current VIM version at the moment of writing)

2. Unpack it

tar -xvjf vim-7.1.tar.bz2

3. Install terminal libraries (vim needs them to compile correctly)

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

4. Configure / Compile / Install

./configure --with-features=huge
make
sudo make install

5. Point your system to newly compiled VIM:

sudo rm /etc/alternatives/vi
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/vim
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/vimdiff
 
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/vim /etc/alternatives/vi
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/vim /etc/alternatives/vim
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/vimdiff /etc/alternatives/vimdiff

DONE

    I’ve been playing a lot lately with RoR (Ruby on Rails) and of course I love DIGG, hence I was very pleased to stumble upon a very interesting work by Patrick Lenz, which is a definitely cool and enjoyable free book (pdf) on how to build a full blown DIGG in Ruby on Rails from scratch!

    I spent a couple of hours reading and trying, and I am already (!) building the app (or should I say building the DIGG) at this point of writing this post. The book uses Web 2.0 approach which covers a lot of Web 2.0 along the way - very cool! I highly recommend it to anybody who has the same passion, since it really is an awesome read!

    Please hurry, as this book is only free (since the moment of me writing this) for "32 days, 14 hours, 21 minutes, 49 seconds" more, and I guess will blend in with many other books that we have to pay for once the time is up (currently it is $26.37 at Amazon).

    For something "not very free", but "the best" on Ruby on Rails, there is another great book "Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition" that can be obtained, well, same place all other "not very free" books are obtained here.

    It is not in any way an intentional advertisement for any of the links above, I am just so exited reading it, that I could not stop my self from sharing with the rest of the universe!