Vim is the editor of the Gods. The Elder Gods. It’s by far the best text editor I’ve ever encountered. Although I’m not a “vim purist” (no hjkl ), I’m fascinated with its power. And there are always new things one can learn about it. It never gets old.

For instance, today the head of my company’s IT department showed me the following cool trick: if you have an XML file loaded in a buffer and you want to have it properly indented, you just hit Escape in your Vim editor and type

:% !xmllint --format %

… and…Magic!

Anyway, lately I’ve spent some time puting together a list of very useful plugins for PHP/Zend Framework and python/django development in order to speed things up and become more productive. My (g)Vim configuration currently uses:

• Vilight colorscheme by Rob Robbins
• snipMate by Michael Sanders
• NERD_Tree by Martin Grenfell
• django snippets by Rob Hudson
• AutoComplPop by Takeshi Nishida

And a custom gvimrc file. If you want to give it a try, check out my GitHub repository at http://github.com/motanelu/GVim-configuration. Installation is very simple, just follow the instructions below (PS: I’m using GVim. If you’re using Vim replace gvimrc with vimrc):

cd ~/
mv .vim .vim.bak
mv .gvimrc .gvimrc.bak
git clone git://github.com/motanelu/GVim-configuration.git
mv GVim-configuration .vim
ln -s ~/.vim/gvimrc ~/.gvimrc

Post a comment and tell me if you find it useful. If you’re a Zend Framework user, have a look over the snippets.