Hints for Editing XRC with Vim

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Vadim Zeitlin

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.