2009-05-16

Vim and Visual Studio

There is a VIM script, visual_studio.vim which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/vim-visual-studio/. It uses the Python Extensions for Windows to integrate VIM and Visual Studio. It can get the files, solutions and its projects from Visual Studio. You can directly compile the solution from within VIM and you can obviously use the "quickfix". It is not an emulation mode for Visual Studio unlike ViEmu, you will be using VIM again.

The page on vim.org says that you need to have Python 2.4. On my Windows box, I have Visual Studio 2008 and GVIM 7.2, which has been compiled with Python 2.4 support. But, the Python interpreter I am using is Python 2.5, which I keep compatible with the Python interpreter on a production machine. As a result, I had no chance to uninstall Python 2.5 for Python 2.4 and no intention to uninstall GVIM 7.2 for GVIM 7.0.

So, I have found Vim binaries compiled for Python 2.5 and Python 2.6. I have downloaded the zip file and overwritten the executables in my Vim directory. If I type

:version

in Vim, I get the following screens:




Which shows that I have finally a Python 2.5 compatible Vim.

By the way, do not forget to install Python Extensions for Windows if you did not installed yet.

If we make a summary
- We have Visual Studio 2008
- We have Python 2.5
- We have Python Extensions for Windows
- We have GVIM 7.2
- We have Python 2.5 binaries for GVIM
- We have the visual_studio.vim

And finally, I have been able to see and use the following menu: