Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Install Vim-outliner on K/Ubuntu

I spoke of vim-outliner a few years ago and was recently reminded of it again while listening to the mintcast podcast regarding orgmode for emacs.

Orgmode seems to be fairly feature rich, but I never liked the whole key combination thing with emacs. To this day, I can't figured out how to close an emacs session. Vim just seems easier. It's a preference.

Vim-outliner doesn't seems to have all the features of orgmode on the great emacs OS, but it is good at what it does...outline. It seems to follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, instead of the emacs philosophy of cram as much as possible into an app. So I attempted to install it on my Kubuntu 9.10 machine and it's not as simple as an aptitude install. So, here is how to get vim-outliner installed and set up on a current version of K/Ubuntu.

$ aptitude install vim-vimoutliner

Make sure you have vim-addon-manager installed. If not install it. Then,

$ sudo vim-addons -w install vimoutliner

Finally, make sure you have the following in your ~/.vimrc file, if you don't already,

filetype plugin indent on

To start vim-outliner, simply open vim with any file with the extention .otl, such as:

vim file.otl

and you're good to go. Please visit my prior post on vim-outliner for a quick tutorial or use vim's help to access the documentation by typing ":help vo" in an open vim session.