VimOrganizer v. 0.30

November 2011

Installation instructions

1. Install VimOrganizer files as you would any other ftplugin, with downloaded files going in their respective directories under your .vim (Linux/Mac) or vimfiles (Windows) directory.

2. Run helptags on the help file in the /doc directory, vimorg.txt, so help items can be accessed using the Vim help system.

3. Make sure your vimrc has these lines:

   filetype plugin indent on
   
   [...and then somewhere below that:]
   
   au! BufRead,BufWrite,BufWritePost,BufNewFile *.org 
   au BufEnter *.org call org #SetOrgFileType()
   

   If you use VimOrganizer much you will also want to configure variables and/or functions in your vimrc. A sample vimrc has been included in the download.

   ALSO, you will want to install the plugins listed below. VimOrganizer will work without them, but some functionality will be unavailable.

4. Make sure you have Calendar.vim installed.
   (Calendar.vim comes included in the /plugin/ directory as part of the Vim runtime in some Vim installs)

Second, here are two plugins that you will want to download to take advantage of Org-mode-like narrowing and link features that have been built into VimOrganizer:

5. Christian Brabandt's NarrowRegion plugin.

6. The Utl "Universal Text Linking" plugin.

If you are running on Windows another plugin will be useful:

7. If you're running on Windows then you may want to get Peter Rodding's shell.vim plugin. It's not necessary, but if you have installed it VimOrganizer will use it to ensure that you don't see the annoying Windows command prompt window pop up when VimOrganizer calls out to Emacs/Org-mode.

8. FINALLY, install Emacs. Not necessary for basic outlining, agenda searches, and other basic stuff, but it is necessary to do exports to html and PDF (which you will definitely want) as well as other advanced stuff. Don't be afraid, install is simply and configuration is not hard.

Vimorg uses a variable, g:org_command_for_emacsclient, to hold the command that will start the emacsclient on your system. If you are not on Linux or OSX you will need to set this explicitly in your .vimrc file.

Also, please note that emacsclient works slightly differently on Windows and Linux/OSX systems. You must manually start Emacs on Linux/OSX or calls to emacsclient will not work. Please see :h vimorg-emacs-setup.

For Emacs you should also install a hook function in the .emacs file, which will automatically make minor conversions when you export and/or open a VimOrganizer .org file in Emacs.You can find the text for that function in the VimOrganizer help file: :h vimorg-orgmode-conversion

If you're scared of Emacs, don't worry. You don't ever need to edit a document using Emacs. The most you will need to do is open up the .emacs configuration file (in Vim) to make some configuration changes, and that is required only if you're doing more advanced stuff. Having said, that, if there are problems it can sometimes be easiest to open Emacs and diagnose an issue there. Still, you don't ever need to edit a document in Emacs, just think of Emacs as your "application server".