Michele Campeotto: Tag plugin

Enhanced buftabs Vim Plugin

micampe — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:16:00 -0700

After a couple of days using my bufpos vim plugin together with buftabs, I realized I didn’t need the buffer numbers in the status line (I can always get them with :ls), but their position number would have been very useful.

So here is my modified version with these three changes:

the tab numbers indicate the the number you have press to get there instead of the buffer number
improved autocmd settings to better synchronize the ! modified flag
different filename shortening mode, now it is displayed with a path relative to the current or home directory (don’t set g:buftabs_only_basename to get that)

I have contacted the buftabs author and the last two will be in the next buftabs release too.

Tabs in Vim and My First Plugin

micampe — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:05:00 -0700

One of the most talked about features of Vim7 are tabs, but I don’t like them very much, I think they should have been given a different name. They could have been called layouts, for example, because they are very different from what most people expect and much more similar to Eclipse’s perspectives or NetBeans workspaces than to Firefox tabs.

I find buffers, which have been in Vim since pretty much forever, are a very convenient way to edit multiple files. You just have to tune them a bit.

First, you absolutely have to set the hidden option, so you can switch between buffers without being forced to save them, and then you need some key mappings:

set hidden
map <C-TAB> :bnext!<CR>
map <C-S-TAB> :bprev!<CR>
map <C-\> :b#<CR>

Use Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab to navigate through the list of open buffers and Ctrl-\ to quickly toggle between two open files.

After using this setup for quite some time, about a week ago I found buftabs, a simple plugin that displays the open buffers in the status line. I like simple plugins, my rule is that they have to be useful without me having to actually learn to use them or even remember they are there.

set laststatus=2
let g:buftabs_in_statusline=1

I then added two more mappings to navigate through buffers, to better match the visual representation buftabs provides.

map <C-b> :bprev!<CR>
map <C-n> :bnext!<CR>

With these switching buffers is even easier, as you have a visual indication of which buffer you are going to activate.

Just one last piece was missing from this picture: most tabs implementations allow you to directly activate a tab by pressing the Alt key and a number, like Firefox, for example.

So here comes my first Vim script ever: bufpos is a very simple script that maps Alt-number keys to activate buffers.

Note that you don’t have to use the buffer number buftabs puts beside the file name, but the position in the buffers list.

gedit Markdown preview plugin

micampe — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:12:00 -0700

This weekend I have installed Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6 on my laptop and found it worked pretty well. Among the nice things, suspend/hibernate/resume work fine and are much faster than on Breezy (apart from a little glitch on resume when connected to AC).

Another nice Dapper thing, coming from the included GNOME 2.14, is the new Text Editor, which now has the enhanced capability to add plugins to the application, and you can write plugins in Python.

As I prefer – for various reasons – plain text over using the big word processors, I have written a simple plugin to help writing Markdown formatted text. The plugin will add an HTML preview in gedit’s bottom panel, allowing you to see how your document will look when rendered. For more info and downloads, refer to the wiki page I created.

Everybody knows that ease of extension is a key to success, so I really hope people start to write cool plugins (the snippets one is great for example) and extend gedit to become more and more powerful. I don’t see it replacing my primary development environment anytime soon, but I was already using it for more document-oriented editing tasks, and it’s great to see it becoming better at every iteration.

PHP ain’t that funny after all

micampe — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 04:17:00 -0700

I don’t like PHP. I use it on the web because it’s everywhere and you can find a busload of code to do pretty much whatever you want. But I really dislike how it’s designed. It’s inconsistent, you’ll never know what might happen when you call that new function you just found.

Take my Technorati Cosmos Textpattern plugin for example. Sometimes Technorati returns duplicated results and I wanted to filter them: when looping over the list of links received from the Cosmos API call, I added them to an array and then looked there before printing the other links.

I looked PHP documentation and found the nice array_search() function. The documentation says:

mixed array_search (mixed needle, array haystack [, bool strict])

Searches haystack for needle and returns the key if it is found in the array, FALSE otherwise.

nice, the function returns FALSE if the item is not in the array, so I went and wrote my check:

if (!empty($cosmo->permalink) and array_search($cosmo->permalink, $items)) {
    // Skip the item if we have already seen it
    continue;
}

where’s the problem with that? Let’s see some examples.

$a = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

var_dump(array_search(3, $a));
var_dump(array_search(1, $a));
var_dump(array_search(8, $a));

this prints, as expected:

int(2)
int(0)
bool(false)

but what happens if we put this in an if statement?

if (array_search(3, $a))
    echo "3 found\n";
else
    echo "3 not found\n";
if (array_search(1, $a))
    echo "1 found\n";
else
    echo "1 not found\n";
if (array_search(8, $a))
    echo "8 found\n";
else
    echo "8 not found\n";

the result is:

3 found
1 not found
8 not found

Why? Because 0 == FALSE and the second test doesn’t pass. Ok, let’s make it more specific.

if (array_search(1, $a) != FALSE)
    echo "1 found\n";

Wrong again, because 0 is still the same as FALSE. Don’t despair, a solution isn’t that far, any of these will work:

if (array_search(1, $a) !== FALSE)
    echo "1 found\n";
if (array_search(1, $a) >= 0)
    echo "1 found\n";
if (is_int(array_search(1, $a)))
    echo "1 found\n";

Functions that returns different data types are just evil, and they are everywhere in PHP. In this case, for example, they force you to use and grasp datatypes in a language which shouldn’t care much about them.

I just uploaded a new release of the Cosmos plugin to fix the duplicates detection.

PHP ain’t that funny, after all.

Technorati Cosmos in Textpattern

micampe — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 06:04:00 -0700

How do you get trackbacks without the spam and at the same time routing around your blogging software lack of that functionality?

Answer: you use some other tool, wich requires an even lower effort both on your and on other people’s side: Technorati Cosmos.

I started with a simple piece of code from Weblog Tools Collection, kept only the clever XML parsing trick and expanded it to a full Textpattern plugin. There was no license attached to that code, so I hope they are fine with me redistributing this.

So here is my Texpattern Technorati Cosmos plugin.

The plugin needs some easy configuration, in form of a Technorati Key and a cache directory wich must be writable by the web server.

To use it just place the tag <txp:mic_technorati_cosmos /> in your article form and you’re mostly done. With the default settings, the generated code will be like this:

<!-- Technorati Cosmos for http://currenturl -->
<h3 class="cosmos_label">Technorati Cosmos <a href=""><img src="bubble"></a></h3>
<ul class="cosmos_list">
    <li><a href="" title="">Cosmo title</a> &mdash; Cosmo excerpt</li>
    <li><a href="" title="">Cosmo title</a> &mdash; Cosmo excerpt</li>
</ul>

The label, the image and the excerpt can be customized and completely removed, please refer to the plugin’s help for more information. rel="nofollow" support is an attribute away, too.

You can see it at work in some of my articles and projects pages. Enjoy.

Update: New version with better duplicates detection

Textpattern WYSIWYG editor 0.3

micampe — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 01:59:00 -0700

I just released a new version of my Textpattern WYSIWYG editor plugin.

This new version adds a Toggle editor link ~~beside the Title field~~ in the left sidebar of the article’s edit page, which allows you to disable (and re-enable) the editor for a single post. When the editor is disabled Textile is enabled again for that post’ body and the article will behave as if the plugin wasn’t there.

I moved the initialization code inside the plugin, so you don’t need to download my TinyMCE code again if you already downloaded it before. Just update the plugin, activate it and you should be good to go.

The plugin is now smart about activating the fancy editor. If mic_tinymce is active, you’ll have a WYSIWYG editor in all new articles. If you disable the editor and write a post using Textile, the editor will not be activated when you edit that post again.

As you can see in the previous article’s comments, people are having troubles which I can’t nail down. I suspect those are problems with some browser. I’ll try to test it in IE as soon as I can, but remember that the plugin will not work in either Safari or Opera, and there’s nothing I can do about that, because they miss some necessary functions.

Update: in version 0.5 the plugin is completely disabled if you are editing an entry previously created with Textile – or equivalent – formatting.

You read it right: Textpattern WYSIWYG editor

micampe — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:04:00 -0800

It’s not that I don’t like Textile (altough I actually prefer Markdown and I use its PHP version in TXP), but a lot of people asked for a WYSIWYG editor in Textpattern and, whatever the nice guys at the forum will tell you, it is actually useful. Moreover, if a customer explicitily asks for it, you will just have to give it to him.

This plugin adds TinyMCE to TXP’s articles editor and is a modified version of the nice Wysi WordPress plugin. I modified it to use TXP’s setting, so you don’t even need do configure it: install, activate and use it.

Update: new version with post-specific Toggle editor function.

Here is a screenshot, installation instructions follow.

The installation is a bit different than usual TXP plugins, but should be fairly easy:

Download my customized TinyMCE (Zip version)
Unzip it in your texpattern directory (not your site root, TXP’s admin root)
Install the mic_tinymce admin plugin and activate it

That’s it. You should now have a new and improved article editor with integrated image browsing and upload.

Update: new release that automatically disables Textile in the article body.