Tuesday 19 July 2016

VIM for PHP development

Today with the more advancement in the PHP development, VIM which is the modal editor performing the similar task of integrated development environment came into existence. It is basically the text editor used to develop wide era of PHP applications, with the less requirements of resources compared to the other platforms and also less hassle in developing the configurations. On choosing the streamlined IDE, you may be charged some penalties but provides the facility to write, organize and refactor code very much quickly. VIM PHP helps you to write the PHP code even much faster than before. Its behavior is dependent upon the use of Meta keys, which indicates that editor is in insert mode. Many developers use VIM for dipping in and out the odd file or for remote server during SSH session.

VIM belongs to the open source project and generally available on all platforms including windows. You can check out the official website for VIM to download the latest version. And if you are using Ubuntu environment, you can find VIM in your package. VIM is not the word processor, but though it can display text with the various formatting.

VIM vs. IDEs

This text based editor is very much light weight compared to the IDE’s for Netbeans and Eclipse. This becomes the boons in balancing the lack of available tasks supported out of box. UNIX can help VIM with standard command line tools, which works with the plain text interface. It also have a good impact of automation setup as, it provides you with automated bash script or an XML file without many point to click interface. The syntax command to write the command line is! Followed. From composing E-mails to editing, VIM serves to be the best for any kind of text editing:

  • Configurable
  • Extendable
  • Core concept: combination

This editor has different modes of operation:

  • Normal Mode: Here no editing is done, only you can give commands
  • Insert mode: It allows editing as and when you need
  • Visual mode: In this mode, it only allows you to select the text
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Highlights for PHP syntax

It is integrated with php.vim plugin to get the improved version of plugin directories and to add a support for PHP keywords like define, static and more. It will also help you in customization by adding more colors of your choice to these keywords. Also, it guides you with the verification and grammatical syntax like if syntax is invalid or if you forget to close the brackets.

FileType Plugins

This kind of plugin enables you to define the basing on the detected PHP script. All files in .vim/ftplugin whose name starts with PHP will be automatically included whenever you are editing the files that contains the PHP code. This plugin works by themselves adding up in this file directory. Vim has multiple ftplugin directory, where general purpose scripts are placed.

Snippets_emu is the most used plugin for generation of the snippets related to control structure.

Why to use VIM

  • It performs the similar functions compared to integrated development environment such as syntax highlighting, code completion, easy ways to write and more
  • It is compatible on almost all machine
  • VIM provides portable configuration and hence you can customize environment according to your wish on all machines
  • Quite faster compared to IDE
VIM is the text based editor and graphics are already pre-installed on the Linux platforms, you don’t have to manually add it. Hence it becomes the most convenient source of editing text files when you only have the access to the command interface on the server. VIM is up to run the sudo commands so editing the system administered files also becomes the boon. Using the VIM tool enhances your work flow and also helps you in gaining the proper insight.

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