Perl Best Practices

Appendix C. Editor Configurations

A suitably configured editor can make coding much easier, and code much more robust. Automating common tasks ensures that those tasks are done correctly every time, and automating common formatting requirements means that those requirements can be followed consistently without effort.

The following sections provide additions for the configuration files of five popular text editors. These additions support many of the layout and debugging guidelines recommended in this book.

vim

vim is one of several successors to the classic Unix text editor vi. You can learn about vim and download the latest open source version for all major operating systems from http://www.vim.org.

The following commands might make useful additions to your .vimrc file:

set autoindent                    "Preserve current indent on new lines
set textwidth=78                  "Wrap at this column
set backspace=indent,eol,start    "Make backspaces delete sensibly

set tabstop=4                     "Indentation levels every four columns
set expandtab                     "Convert all tabs typed to spaces
set shiftwidth=4                  "Indent/outdent by four columns
set shiftround                    "Indent/outdent to nearest tabstop

set matchpairs+=<:>               "Allow % to bounce between angles too

"Inserting these abbreviations inserts the corresponding Perl statement...
iab phbp  #! /usr/bin/perl -w
iab pdbg  use Data::Dumper 'Dumper';^Mwarn Dumper [];^[hi
iab pbmk  use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );^Mcmpthese -10, {};^[O
iab pusc  use Smart::Comments;^M^M###
iab putm  use Test::More qw( no_plan );

iab papp ^[:r ...