Live from Tokyo: Tech Blog

Vim is too clever by half

I installed VIM on my notebook. I decided to try and switch over to vi(m) for most of my text editing tasks because it is free and because vi is sure to be available on all Unix machine that I have had to edit files on. There is nothing worse than editing a file, especially one that if you mess it up you can't login again, with vi when you only know a handful of commands and it is likely that you are going to make a mess of the file through incompetance.

I have one problem with vim though. I installed on Japanese XP and I want to use the English menus. Vim is really smart and it is completely localized in Japanese. The help files indicate that is possible to select any language you like but I can't seem to find the right command to change the menus to English. I write this in the hope that someone who knows how will tell me what voodoo is required to get vim to work on Japanese XP.

Later: I found that you just have to have an _vimrc in your home directory i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\YourName with the command "set langmenu=en" in it. The confusing thing was that I didn't read the manual where it said that that the langmenu doesn't work from Vim's command line. You have to do some extra voodoo to change the menu's dynamically or make the command run before the menus run.

Even Later: If you are using VIM on a Japanese system you'll probably want to add set "iminsert=0" in your _vimrc to avoid the Japanese IME being invoked by default when you insert text by default. I'm pretty sure that this would annoy most Japanese programmers too.