ParaMenu

Description

Many tasks done with Vim can be achieved in an extremely keystroke-efficient manner, but sadly there are exceptions which are a bit more tedious than necessary. ParaMenu is a simple framework for creating keystroke-efficient user interfaces. It should be fit to be used in most situations where the user needs to select an item from a list of items. In practice, this can end up saving a number of keystrokes compared to quickfix-window-style (e.g. :cwindow) or cmdline-style (e.g. :ls, :bn, :b) selection. At the very least, they require input to be completed with a whereas ParaMenu does not. ;)

For each item the user may select, ParaMenu will display a series of keys corresponding to that item. The user may enter a string from one of these items to select it, or enter from the paired series of keys to select it.

For example, see the following image:

The first three lines are simply part of the current vim window from before activating the plugin. The bottom four lines are due to the ParaBuffers plugin. The user may select one of the three open buffers: .bashrc, .zshrc, and .vimrc. This can be done by either entering the values in the left-most column (here, either "0", "1" or "2") to select an item or entering a unique part of the item's text (for example, "z" is unique to .zshrc and will select it, but "rc" is not unique to any of the files and will not select any of them.

ParaMenu is bundled with three commands which utilize this functionality: ParaBuffers for managing buffers, ParaTags for managing tags, and ParaQuickFix, an alternate interface for :cwindow.

Installation

There are a few ways you could go about installing ParaMenu, all of which are fairly standard for Vim plugins:

• Untar/unzip the ParaMenu package in your vimfiles directory. (See ":help vimfiles".)
• Untar/unzip the ParaMenu package in some temporary location, then manually copy the ParaMenu.vim file into the "plugin" directory under your vimfiles directory and the ParaMenu.txt file into the "doc" directory under your vimfiles directory.
• If you use the pathogen vim plugin, you can untar/unzip the ParaMenu package and place it within its own folder in the "bundle" directory under your vimfiles directory.

On a Unixy system without pathogen, the ParaMenu.vim file should be located at:

~/.vim/plugin/ParaMenu.vim

On a Unixy system with pathogen, the ParaMenu.vim file should be located at:

~/.vim/bundle/ParaMenu/plugin/ParaMenu.vim

On a Windows system without pathogen, the ParaMenu.vim file should be located at:

%USERPROFILE%\vimfiles\plugin\ParaMenu.vim

On a Windows system with pathogen, the ParaMenu.vim file should be located at:

%USERPROFILE%\vimfiles\bundle\ParaMenu\plugin\ParaMenu.vim

Further Documentation

Once installed, further documentation for ParaMenu and its bundled commands (ParaBuffers, ParaTags and ParaQuickFix) can be viewed by running the command ":help ParaMenu.txt"