Update ctags with brew

The "ctags" coming with Mac OS is really a very old one (1993). We can update it with brew, and I think this Article is very useful.

The point is:

• Install latest ctags with brew: brew install ctags. This should be OK
• Replace "ctags" with:
1. alias ctags="`brew --prefix`/bin/ctags"
2. alias ctags >> ~/.bash_profile
3. Please note that the original post uses ~/.bashrc but it won't work in Mac OS. So use ~/.bash_profile instead

`brew --prefix` will display the install path of brew, and append it with /bin/ctags will get the new ctags pathname. Please note that "`" is the character with the key "~" on your keyboard.

Error in .vimrc

So I copy my .vimrc from my PC to Mac. I put it into ~/. But when start MacVim, there is error message like this:

E488: Trailing characters: nocompatible^M

So the vimrc can't be loaded into MacVim. I googled but their solution doesn't work for me. There is a very simple solution is....


1. In terminal:

$mv ~/.vimrc vimrc

$mvim ~/.gvimrc

2. Then in vim:

:tabe ~/vimrc

:gg

:ctrl+v

:G

:y

:tabp

:p

That means, copy the whole content from "vimrc" to ".gvimrc" in MacVim. So the ".gvimrc" will work well.

Vim for Mac

I use vim for many years (on windows), so I also want to use vim on Mac. Because Mac OS is a type of UNIX, so there is a text based vim built-in it. But I want a GUI vim. It seems that MacVim is the best choise for vimer on OSX. You can download it from: https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim, or http://code.google.com/p/macvim/.

After download / install MacVim, there are two method to open it in console:

• $open -a MacVim
• $mvim

Let me explain:


1. open -a MacVim
Because MacVim is installed on /Application, so the system allow us to open the app by the name, the path is not needed. It is very handy, but it seems that if you want to edit a file with administrator privilege, "sudo open -a MacVim" can't work. So we need the second method.

2. mvim
mvim is included in the install package of MacVim, you can copy it to a dir, for example, I have a directory: ~/scripts, and I copy mvim into ~/scripts. Then I need to add ~/scripts into the PATH.
Because OSX read the follow configurations when terminal opens (via this):

• /etc/profile
• ~/.bash_profile
• ~/.bash_login
• ~/.profile

So we can edit ~/.profile and add this line:

export PATH=~/scripts:$PATH

into it. So ~/scripts is added into PATH whenever you open a terminal.
Then in terminal, you can just type:
$mvim <path to file>
or
$sudo mvim <path to system file>
to edit.