Vim on Windows

This is mostly intended as a note to myself, but might be useful to anyone who have trouble with Cygwin. I found instructions and help on these topics to be sparse and sometimes difficult to find, thus i decided to compile them in this handy document. This file describes how I set up my programming environment in windows 8 using the following:

• Cygwin with the mintty terminal
• Vim Custom vimrc, Pathogen and some useful plugins
• Solarized color palette for both vim and mintty
• Sourcepro font

Vim Plugins:

• Neocomplete
• Ultisnips
• Julia-vim

This is more a collection of links and notes if some part of an installation turned out to be trick in Cygwin, install instructions will be in the links.

Cygwin

Get latest version, mintty should be included. During the Cygwin installation remember to tick of Vim as a package to be installed. The installer can be run again to update Cygwin or install new packages.

A few useful things one can install this way:

• Vim
• gcc
• tex
• Lua interpreter Needed for Neocomplete
• Python interpreter Needed for Ultisnips

Vimrc

Copied Amir Salihefendics vimrc and made some minor additions.

Solarized

A nice color palette, need to be installed separately for vim and mintty:

• Vim: https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized
• Mintty: https://github.com/mavnn/mintty-colors-solarized add Term=xterm-256color to your .minttyrc file in addition to the other changes in the installation.

Even thought you only want Solarized in Vim, iff you use Vim in terminal mode, you will need the palette colors in the terminal as well.

Sourcepro font

• Download https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases
• Install instructions http://www.adobe.com/products/type/install-instructions.html

Pathogen

Curl is mentioned in the installation, disregard that. Just git clone in the ~/.vim folder

Vim Plugins

With pathogen installed, any plugins can easily be installed by cloning them into the ~/.vim/bundle folder.

neocomplete

Require vim with Lua, this is included in Cygwin type vim --version and there should be +lua/dyn in the list. Check in vim by typing: :echo has("Lua") should return a 1.If 0 is returned, check that you selected the Lua interpreter when installing Cygwin. Lastly add let g:neocomplete#enable_at_startup = 1 to the .vimrc

UltiSnips

Require vim with Python, this is also included in Cygwin, and can be checked similarly to checking for Lua. In the vim --version list there should be a '+' in front of python/dyn. Check if python works by typing :py print "anything" in vim.

UltiSnips come without any default snips installed. Default snips can be found here