Head here for protodef.
Head here for fswitch.

Thanks to Matt Spear, Timon Kelter and Dmitry Bashkatov. Sorry about the wait fellas.

This is an extremely simple and elegant script. All it does is manipulate the ‘runtimepath’ but it has a nice focus on allowing you to componentize your Vim extensions into their own, private ‘runtimepath’ tree segments. So what? So what?!? Now you can easily upgrade your extensions by just deleting the old tree, downloading the package and exploding it in place.

This would have saved my ass when xptemplate went through a revision that deleted files, and I didn’t notice. Having unwanted, autoloaded files in place was not a good thing.

And you can also just toss git suppositories straight into this as well – perfect updating.

Check out Tammer Saleh‘s post called The Modern Vim Config with Pathogen for a concise description on how to get it into your vimrc.

function! RedirToClipboardFunction(cmd, ...)
    let cmd = a:cmd . " " . join(a:000, " ")
    redir @*>
    exe cmd
    redir END
endfunction

command! -complete=command -nargs=+ RedirToClipboard
    \ silent! call RedirToClipbaordFunction(<f -args>)

This function allows you to run a command (such as :history, hint hint) and have the contents placed to the clipboard that you can then paste somewhere else.

The command that is created just makes it easier to use. For example:

:RedirToClipboard history : -50,

Work has picked up in the last little while and on top of that, I’m buying a new house and am preparing for the move. After the move finishes I should be able to do another one. The only real problem is that the new videos are going to be of the intermediate and advanced quality and those take a lot more thought and time :)

I appreciate all the great responses, encouragement and all the interest! Keep reading those help files and stay tuned…

Using an Autocommand

You can do this with an autocmd in your vimrc. Let’s assume you want to change some of the indenting rules for perl and html.

augroup indent_settings
    au!
    au BufEnter *.pl setl autoindent smartindent
    au BufEnter *.html setl noautoindent nosmartindent
augroup END

The above will do a setlocal when entering a perl or html file. It will turn autoindent to ‘on’ and smartindent to ‘on’ when you enter a buffer containing a perl file, and will turn them off when entering a buffer containing an html file.

Dropping the commands in a filetype file

You can also choose to organize things into separate ftplugin files in your runtime directory. If we want to continue with the perl and html examples above, you would do the following:

In ftplugin/perl.vim:

setl autoindent
setl smartindent

In ftplugin/html.vim:

setl noautoindent
setl nosmartindent

I may redo this one, not sure yet – it’ll just depend on how much time I’ve got.