Best Swift Plugin for VIM Til' May 2015

UPDATE 2015-06-11: My recommended swift.vim enables expandtab automatically, which replaces tab with spaces. Personally I would prefer tab, so if you’re like me, please edit ./bundle/vim-swift/ftplugin/swift.vim and remove all the expandtab parts.

The good thing with XVim is that you get VIM key binding in your Xcode, and don’t need to worry about syntax color, indentation, auto completion, etc. However, VIM in iTerm is still the best editor for me for various reasons. I’m not going to list all of them because it’s pointless: I’m not trying to convince anyone that VIM in terminal is better since everyone has his own opinion. For me I always enjoy a fully functional shell environment with text editors that comes to me when I hit a simple hotkey F1, which beats the crap out of Microsoft Windows and its powerless PowerShell. But anyway, since I almost moved to Swift completely since last year, a Swift file-type plugin is essencial for my work.

I’ve been using Toyamarinyon’s vim-swift. It’s a very basic file-type plugin with very limited syntax highlight, in which the function parameters never look right, and simply uses cindent for indenting, which results an additional tab when a semicolon is missing at the end of the line, but comparing with Keith’s swift.vim, at least the closing curly bracket is correctly unindented. Today it came to my mind and I decided to check what’s new in the scene, so I took a look and it appears that vim-swift has not been updated at all, and swift.vim still has the terrible problem with closing bracket. Luckily, Kballard’s vim-swift appears at the top of Google search this time, and it looks quite promising at the first glance. Although the syntax highlight doesn’t look fancy, indentation seems to be much better with this plugin, so I’d like to give it a shot.

As stated vim-swift doesn’t work well with set showmatch, but someone also mentioned that showparent is actually a better solution than showmatch. It seems to be nice too and in my case the vimrc syntax is:

hi MatchParen cterm=none ctermbg=green ctermfg=white

BTW I now put ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim into my Dropbox folder, and created symbolic link of them so that whenever I make changes, it automatically appears in other computers of mine as well. Hard linke doesn’t work every well with Dropbox in this case.

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