Hints for Editing XRC with Vim

If you are one of those strange people who prefer to write XRC files manually instead of using one of the many GUI editors, and also one of the enlightened people using Vim as their text editor you may be interested in this hint: although Vim is smart enough to detect that XRC files are XML without any extra prodding (as the presence of header at start of each XRC file is enough for XML file type detection to work), things can be made more comfortable with a little extra effort.

Before doing anything else you need to modify your .vimrc or _vimrc (under Windows) file to detect XRC files as a separate file type. For this simply add the following line to it:

au BufNewFile,BufReadPost *.xrc set ft=xrc

I also like to start with XML boilerplate already filled in when I create a new file so I additionally have

au BufNewFile *.xrc read ~/vim/template.xrc

where the file template.xrc contains

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<resource>
    <object class="" name="">
    </object>
</resource>

Now, I'd like to do spell checking in the XRC elements which contain user visible text. For this I create the file ~/vim/syntax/xrc.vim (this works under Windows too, just use whatever Vim considers to be your home directory instead of ~) with the following contents:

runtime syntax/xml.vim

syn region xmlString start="\(<title>\)\@<=[A-Z0-9]" end="\(</title>\)\@=" contains=xmlEntity,@Spell
syn region xmlString start="\(<text>\)\@<=[A-Z0-9]" end="\(</text>\)\@=" contains=xmlEntity,@Spell
syn region xmlString start="\(<label>\n\?\)\@<=[A-Z0-9]" end="\(</label>\)\@=" contains=xmlEntity,@Spell

and enjoy Vim help with correcting your mipsellings (how did you notice I wasn't writing this post in Vim?). Notice that the region definition is not very elegant but this was the best way I could find to make it work: using \zs unfortunately didn't work.


Next, I also defined a couple of helpful macros to insert the common constructions into XRC. This is done in ~/vim/ftplugin/xrc.vim (which will be sourced automatically by Vim thanks to our file type autocommand):

runtime! ftplugin/xml.vim

nmap <Leader>o o<object class=""><C-M><Esc>kf"a
nmap <Leader>v o<object class="wxBoxSizer"><C-M><Esc>O<Tab><orient>wxVERTICAL<Esc>o
nmap <Leader>h o<object class="wxBoxSizer"><C-M><Esc>O<Tab><orient>wxHORIZONTAL<Esc>o
nmap <Leader>i o<object class="sizeritem"><C-M><Esc>O<Tab><flag>wxALL<Esc>o<border>5

Notice that this supposes that you have the XML editing plugin installed, notably it relies on it to close all the tags. But surely you don't edit XML in Vim without it anyhow, right?


Much more could probably be done but I find that the above already makes editing XRC much more comfortable. And I definitely can do it much faster in Vim than using any GUI I tried so far.

Spring News

Unfortunately I didn't have time to write the April summary until the second week of May and by then it seemed too late so I decided to postpone it and write a combined April-May one. As usual, postponing things doesn't make them easier however and now I find myself unable (due to all the usual reasons of lack of time, partly due to real life getting into the way) to write the May summary properly neither. But better something than nothing so let me just make a very short one.

Most of the activity in wx development community during this time was centred around 2.9.0 release. It still didn't happen but we're now at release candidate 4 and it looks good -- or at least good enough to not justify postponing 2.9.0 any more -- so the final release should be expected very soon. Of course, if you haven't tried 2.9.0-RC4 (or bz2 version if you prefer a much smaller download) yet you're strongly encouraged to do it and post your feedback to wx-users mailing list.

Speaking of the mailing lists, this was the most important administrative change in our recent history: all the lists (including wx-users and wx-dev) have migrated to Google Groups as the current (virtual) server didn't hold the charge any more resulting not only in disruptions to the mailing list traffic but also to frequent Trac outages as everything on that machine slowed down to a crawl due to Postfix bogging all the disk bandwidth. Some people disliked this change but from our point of view there was simply no other solution as switching to Google Groups was much easier than paying for a better server and administering it ourselves.

The only drawback of switching (so far) is that we still don't have any solution for the gateway between wx-users and comp.soft-sys.wxwindows USENET group. Unfortunately Google Groups don't provide this feature and so someone still needs to host this gateway -- if anybody reading this can volunteer either resources or at least information about how to do it, it would be great.


Other than that the usual cycle of adding new features and fixing old bugs continued. Among the features I can remember the following additions:

• Status bar tool tips shown when the text is truncated.


• Better integration with the standard streams (thanks to Jonathan Liu): now you can wrap any wxStream as a std::stream and/or std::streambuf (we still need a way to wrap any std::streambuf as a wxStream to achieve perfect interoperability).


• XRC improvements: wxListCtrl columns and item can now be defined directly in the resource files which is very convenient, especially for the columns (thanks go to Kinaou Hervé). And wxImageList support which was added to allow this is also available for the other controls using it such as wxTreeCtrl and various wxBookCtrl-derived classes.


• A new wxMouseEventsManager class was added to abstract mouse handling in controls with items -- it doesn't seem like much but actually handling the mouse events properly, including respecting users mouse sensitivity options, is not that trivial. It still remains to modify the existing code in generic wxListCtrl, wxTreeCtrl and wxDataViewCtrl implementations to use it.


• An already existing but private until then wxTextWrapper was promoted to a public class status.


• More wxGrid tweaks: it's now possible to selectively disable resizing of individual rows or columns (despite the incredible (and confusing) richness of wxGrid API you couldn't do it before: it was all or nothing only).


• Laurent Humbertclaude has submitted a patch adding table border width support to wxHtmlWindow which allows to have visually nicer tables in wx applications.

Finally, the GSoC projects seem to be all getting into their stride nicely. I don't know much about the other two ones but I'm very satisfied with the progress of the one I'm mentoring. Moreover, it seems that Bartosz is going to add some important enhancements to wxEventLoop which are not part of file system events notification project strictly speaking but which would be very useful to any wx applications which need to monitor anything at all (to be more precise, any file descriptor, HANDLE or CFRunLoopSource depending on the platform) while running.


That's all for today -- and I'll try to find time to write more about June changes and also to finally finish my long promised and long overdue post about Bind() soon.