Notes about how to get to my working setup from scratch.
At work I use tcsh and can't do things like install fancy fonts. At home I use bash and can do any amount of mucking around. In order to use the same set of dotfiles for both, set environmental variable WORKENV
for a pared down and/or tcsh setup.
In bash
export WORKENV=1
In tcsh
setenv WORKENV 1
NOTE: A setup script has been added to automate this portion as well as the Terminal Fonts installation. To set up vim and terminal fonts run:
./vim_setup.sh
The description below is kept as an explanation of what this script does.
Before starting, make sure you create the ~/.vim/tmp/
directory for history and swap files
$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/tmp
We need to have Vundle installed, after that it will take care of other plugins
$ git clone https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim.git ~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
Start vim
$ vim
You may get an error or two since the plugins haven't installed, but now run
:PluginInstall
to pull and install the plugins. Quit vim and restart and you should be good to go.
Most of the files here are setup to put things into 256 color mode, but even that is a very limited color set. I'm trying to standardize on solarized-dark, but it requires some manual interventions to use.
In Windows, it requires some changes to each session to get solarized colors. This is most easily done in the registry editor with the included file putty_solarized_dark.reg
. Edit the file to include the session name you want to edit (or add a new session to use a starting point for others) and run the file to perform the edits.
Newer versions of Konsole have solarized built in, but older ones do not. For older versions, I manually entered the colors from https://github.com/phiggins/konsole-colors-solarized
Some terminals aren't as configurable, specifically the terminal in Jupyter Notebooks or Guacamole. I use these infrequently enough that I can just tolerate the crappy colors. To get around the most jarring conflict (Vim solarized), I added a vim hotkey <leader>m to quickly switch to desert color theme.
airline (and powerline) are awesome plugins for Vim, but the downside is that they require special font support to show special symbols. In the pared down version of my scripts, with WORKENV=1
, I try to get around this by using unicode characters in place, but even this doesn't work everywhere with every font. At work where I can't install fonts, I get around this by defining unicode friendly symbols in Vim. On windows, I install and use a powerline patched font from https://github.com/powerline/fonts and set it in GVim and terminal. As of now, I'm using SourceCodePro.