Vim is an incredibly flexible text editor. I continue to be surprised by the number of strange things it’s capable of doing. For example, there is a crude Tetris clone available for Vim.

A bit more useful, though, is the cvsmenu script for Vim. This is a fairly polished plug-in that will allow you to do all of the basic CVS tasks from inside your text editor. The supported CVS commands are: add, diff, commit, update, status, shortstatus, localstatus, and revertchanges.

Since the plug-in is poorly documented, I thought that I would take this opportunity to explain how to use it.

Installation

In Ubuntu, this is pretty simple.

% sudo aptitude install vim-scripts

% vim-addons install cvsmenu

This will install the package and enable the plugin for your user.

Usage

I will assume that you already have a versioned source tree checked out on your system. Start by opening a file in this tree. You can open a diff view by typing “,cd”. Note: that’s comma, C, D.

The local revision is shown on the right, the remote revision is on the left. This is a bit backwards from the Eclipse and Netbeans way of doing things. Typing CTRL+W+W will move your cursor between the two revisions. I haven’t found an easy way to move a change to the right, but I would be interested in reader comments.

Here is an index of the commands. They may be documentation somewhere but I was only able to find them by looking at the plug-in source code.

• ,ca - Add
• ,cd - Diff
• ,ci - Commit
• ,cu - Update
• ,cs - Status
• ,ch - Short Status
• ,cc - Local Status
• ,cv - Revert Local Changes. The odd thing about this is that it only updates the file on disk. It doesn’t actually revert the changes in the open editor.

Modern IDEs do ease the pain of performing mundane versioning tasks such as merging. But, this is a nice alternative to those heavy-weight tools.

A recent article on the socialthing! blog made me curious about setting up a site specific browser in Ubuntu.

This is a pretty simple thing to accomplish and it beats the heck out of the currently available Ubuntu twitter clients.

Start by installing the prism package.

компютриsudo aptitude install prism

You can then setup a new application by starting prism either from the command line or from the applications menu. Setup is pretty self-explanitory but here is a screenshot for good measure.

If your looking for a good socialthing! icon, you can find one here. Then launch your new app and voila!

You might also checkout prism-facebook, prism-google-mail, prism-google-reader, and prism-twitter.

I was just reading the Ubuntu development process documentation. In particular the document on Time Based Releases.

I think they really hit the nail on the head with this one. This quote caught my attention:

The overall quality and punctuality of an Ubuntu release are more important than any single feature, and a high-quality feature is superior to a hastily-added one, even if it arrives in a later release. Free software developers are passionate about their work, and it is easy to get carried away by a particular feature, losing sight of the greater goals of Ubuntu. Pause, breathe, and consider whether it is more important to get it now or to get it right.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Feature creep is difficult to avoid. When trying to deliver a release it seems that issues keep getting added to the pile. Eventually, the release has taken three times longer to get out the door than initially planned.

Software development needs to be flexible and respond to changes as they arise, but it seems like setting some hard deadlines can go a long way towards delivering useful software.