Just lately I've been tinkering a bit more with Linux-y things, among which trying to get to grips with a bit of bash scripting. As my main work environment is a Windows 10 system, the obvious place for such tinkering is in the Windows Sub-System for Linux (WSSL or WSL depending on whose abbreviation you favour). In any case, the bash prompt in Windows.

Generally, WSSL works rather well, <rant>my main proviso there being the really unhelpful problems with permissions. I get it... it's probably a really nasty job to fix it, but really!.... for chmod to be broken is just wrong! More to the point, it means I can't use a private key for ssh logins to other systems. Maybe I'll go back to cygwin after all.</rant>

Anyway, today's problem was rather more tractable. I wanted to edit a bash script using gvim. My first attempt was just to open it from the bash prompt:

dominic@DOMINIC:/mnt/d/code/bash$ gvim foo.sh
E233: cannot open display
Press ENTER or type command to continue

Yeah OK, that then falls back to a standard vim session in the terminal, but if that's what I'd wanted, I wouldn't have typed 'gvim'.

It turns out that there's a version of gvim in the Ubuntu user-space stuff that comes with WSSL. When you type gvim at the prompt, it finds /usr/bin/gvim in the PATH, and tries to open that.

Nil desperandum

dominic@DOMINIC:/mnt/d/code/bash$ file /usr/bin/gvim
/usr/bin/gvim: symbolic link to `/etc/alternatives/gvim'
dominic@DOMINIC:/mnt/d/code/bash$ sudo unlink /usr/bin/gvim
dominic@DOMINIC:/mnt/d/code/bash$ sudo ln -s /mnt/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/vim/vim80/gvim.exe /usr/bin/gvim

After that it worked like a treat. Maybe the other way to go would be to see if you can get an XWindows server running on WSSL, but this got me up and running without having to get into even more faff with copies of rc files and whatnot.

This is just a quick note-to-self to remind me of the stuff I always forget when installing plugins and the like for Vim on a Windows machine. So of course this means gVim. The confusing thing is always that the documentation for everything refers to your ~/.vim directory. And - you haven't got one. Here's the note to self.

Your ~/.vim directory is called vimfiles

And ~ is probably somewhere like C:\Users\dominic - your .vimrc will be there too, so you can find it by running vim and doing

:echo $MYVIMRC

I've used the vi text editor for many years; (at least long enough to know that it's pronounced vie and not vee-eye!). Over those years my level of expertise has varied somewhat - I'm fairly sure I've learned some commands and forgotten them several times over. Anyway - recently (i.e. in the last year or so), I've put some more effort in to reacquainting myself with some of its many joys. In practice, of course, I really mean vim: I'd be hard-pressed to remember the last time I saw vi in its "good-old-fashioned" form (does one say Plain-old-vi?) As most of my work is on Windows systems, this means using gVim.

Of the many improvements that vim has over vi, syntax highlighting is one of my favourites. The trouble is, one of my commonest use-cases for editing text files on Windows systems is .NET configuration files. Because these have a file extension of .config, they aren't recognised by default as XML files, and I end up going through the rigmarole of selecting one menu option to get a choice of file types added to the menus, and then locating XML among those newly added options to get highlighting to come on. Well there had to be a better way, and of course there was. What you have to do is this:

• Locate your vi directory (on the system I was working on this evening, it's "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\"
• Having found this directory, locate or create C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vimfiles\ftdetect
• In ftdetect, create a file called config.vim with the following contents:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.config     set filetype=xml

I have Windows configured to use vi as the default editor for .config files, so now with this in place, all I have to do is double-click on the file and it opens with XML syntax-highlighting enabled. Great stuff!