> Been a long long time vi user but bizarrely never made the
> jump to vim until quite recently.
Welcome!
> I'm editing a lot of complex html/cake-php thtml templates at
> the moment and despite useful color highlighting I'm finding
> it quite difficult to see the "wood for the trees" due to the
> complex templates i have to edit. Typically for example, I've
> got tags with just about every possible attribute populated
> stretching over 3-4 lines sometimes. Imagine that embedded in
> huge multi level tables with specific tags.... I'm stuck with
> the templates to adhere to corporate style.
Well, since they can be slightly reformatted, as HTML generally
ignores whitespace, you may be able to use an external tool like
"tidy" to clean up the code so it's a bit easier to read. It
should also help with normalizing the indentation.
You may also be interested in reading about "folding" which
collapses multiple lines into one:
:help folding
You can manually create folds to hide away particularly
nettlesome segments if there are just a handful, or you can go
for a more automated way of folding them. Folds are only
line-wise rather than character-wise (though there is an vim
patch floating around to also do column-wise folding...this is
hearsay, as I've never tried it). Folding can be done by a
variety of methods, defaulting to "manual", but also allowing it
to be done by syntax, by expression, or by indentation. Or even
the manual folding can be done in a semi-automated fashion via a
:g command such as
:g/<[^>]*$/.,/>/fold
which may be a good first place to start. If you used "tidy" and
it has normalized indentation, you can just use
:set foldmethod=indent
and it may allow you to get a bird's-eye view of your code.
> to abbreviate or partially hide the detail so i can see the
> overall structure more clearly. In essence I would like to
> collapse huge (single) lines of tags to something like <a
> id="xyz" href="/img ....... - where "...." implies I could
> expand if required.
Another lazy option might just be to visually hide it with
something like
:match Ignore /<\_[^>]*>/
which will just hide all the tags (making them background-color
on background-color). This is dangerous if you start editing and
treat them like you would treat whitespace, but it can help make
your content pop. Or you might try
/<\s*\w\+\s\+\zs\_[^>]*/
which will just discolor your attribtes. If you want to see them
but make them more subdued, you can opt for a different
highlighting group than "Ignore", something like
:match Comment /.../
where, at least in my setup, Comment is dark grey on black which
allows me to see it, but it isn't quite as intrusive. When done,
you can un-:match them with
:match none
You can read all about this at
:help :match
> For lots of boring reasons I don't have the option of funky
> graphical html editors or environments - i'm in a remote shell
> using vim in text mode.
You have Vim...what more do you need? ;-)
Hope this gives you some ideas with which to work...
-tim
