The official gvim icon (left) is showing its age. The palette seems to be from the days of 256color, there is no anti-aliasing to speak of in many variants, and it’s just generally bland. I have found a few more modern variants, most notably the tango version, but none of them looked terribly great to me.

So I set out to create a more modern rendering of the classic logo. I exchanged the round serifs for a round diamond, added some psuedo-3d shading, gradients and shadows. All in all I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out: 128px / svg

If you’d like to use this for gvim, you should do something like this¹:

mkdir -p ~/.icons
cd ~/.icons
wget http://gfxmonk.net/misc/gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
tar zxf gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
rm gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz

Then go to your system’s theme selector and pick the “gfxmonk” icon theme.

If all the other (non-gvim) icons have now reverted to the system default and you didn’t want that, you will need to edit ~/.icons/gfxmonk/index.theme and set the inherits value to the name of your preferred icon set².

Note: the svg icon may need the norasi font installed to display properly.

I haven’t used vim’s :make command much, mostly because I don’t often use compiled languages, and setting :errorformat correctly for nonstandard programs is a dark, dark art.

Recently I got :make and :errorformat working well enough with sbt, so the only remaining problem is that vim completely locks up while the make task is going. That really sucks, as sbt can take a good 20 seconds to even just compile and install an android app.

Enter background-make (for GVim only, sorry terminal freaks). It’s not perfect, but for non-pathological makeprg settings it seems to work very reliably. It adds a :Make command that does exactly what :make does, except it does it in the background.

And it tries its very best to not disrupt you - by default, it’ll send a system notification the moment that make finishes. But it will then wait until you are in either insert or normal mode, at which point it’ll take the opportunity to pop up the error window and restore your cursor position / mode. (It has to wait for normal or insert mode because these are the only ones I can figure out how to restore ;))

It’s implemented by firing off a background make process with the current vim instance’s v:servername so that it knows where to send the results (thus the GVim requirement). Once complete, it uses --remote-send to tell the originating vim instance to open the now-complete errorfile. Oh, and it also requires a python-enabled vim, because vimscript makes me wince.