Another game concept prototype – Sine

Honestly, I have no idea what I was going for with this one. It started off last weekend with a vague idea about matching patterns of numbers and old-school graphics and I don't know what and ended up with this.

The idea is to make the bottom row match the top row, basically. There are several front-ends to this game so you can choose the style of play you prefer - numbers and letters, waves, colours or a generated sound wave (if you have a shiny new-fangled browser). It uses the nifty little Riffwave library to generate PCM data and push it into an audio element.

Further development

If I were to develop this further, I'd try and build it in a modular fashion so that front-ends could be generated really easily and open it to other people to see how many different ways this game could be played. It'd be an interesting social experiment to be able to play what is fundamentally the same game in a dozen different ways. You could find out if visual thinkers processed the information faster than numerical or audio-focused people. Leaderboards could allow different styles of player to compete on the same playing field but with a different ball (hmm, weak sports analogy). The rhythms of the game lend themselves well to generated drum tracks so there's probably something in that area for exploring as well.

At the moment, the code is written as the programming equivalent of stream-of-consciousness – global variables everywhere, some camel-case, some underscored, vague comments sprinkled around. There's some commented-out code for the wave mode that moves the waves closer together so that there's a time-limit set but I felt it didn't suit the game.

Okay, this'll be my last vim post for a while. I just couldn't leave it alone, though.

My Cobalt theme was good but it wasn't quite enough. You'll see from the screenshots that the entire HTML page had the same background colour in Vim while the TextMate version changed the background colour inside <style> and <script> blocks. I was surprised how much that bugged me so I figured there must be a way to highlight an entire line. It turns out this isn't a trivial thing to do. Syntax matches will only match to the final character in the line ($), not the width of the screen. No amount of tweaking a colorscheme would allow highlighting all the way across.

After a lot of digging around, I found out about signs. This is a built-in feature which allows you to add a marker to a line for whatever purpose you want. It can point out debugging information or provide visual checkpoints to mark out things in your document. It's probably very handy but as I've only just started using vim, I don't really know what it's best for. However, as a side-effect, it can also apply a style to the entire screen-width of a line.

Some googling, hacking and probable violation of Vim plugin best-practice, I knocked together this plugin:

HighlightBlocks.vim

When this is installed, it will highlight any embedded CSS or JS blocks in a HTML, PHP, Velocity templates or Ruby files. Well, it will apply the syntax class 'HighlightedBlock' to the line. If your theme has a style for that, it will highlight it. Incidentally, I updated the Cobalt port to include that style.

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It runs on initial load then refreshes every time you exit insert mode.

I might update it later to highlight PHP blocks in HTML or some other things like that but for my current purposes, it's finished.

Warning

• It pays no attention to existing signs. If you use them, you probably shouldn't use this. If you know of a simple way to group signs together to stop me messing with them, let me know.
• When signs are added to a file, an extra two-character column appears to the left of the line numbers. This plugin shrinks the line-numbers column by two characters if signs exist and increases it again when they are removed. This stops everything from jumping around but if you're working on a 10,000 line file, you might see some confusion down the bottom.

Installation

As with the Cobalt theme, if you're using Janus, add this to ~/.janus.rake, I still have no idea if this works. It might. :

vim_plugin_task "HighlightBlock.vim", "git://github.com/thingsinjars/HighlightBlock.vim.git"

What?!

Another port of the TextMate theme 'Cobalt' to Vim?

But there are already so many!

Yes. Yes there are. However, the other ones I found were all missing something. Some had the right colours but in the wrong places, some had most of the right things highlighted but in slightly wrong colours. None of them had coloured the line-numbers. I think this is the most complete port. The initial work was done automatically using Coloration and then manually tweaked and added to. I know I should probably have just picked one of the existing GitHub projects, cloned it and pushed to it but I feel it would be a tad presumptuous of me to just turn up in someone's repository one day saying "yeah, you did alright but mine's better". Besides, I've never tried making a theme for Vim before. I've probably done something wrong (see below). If it continues to work for a while without causing any major issues, I might look at pushing it to another repo.

This was done on top of a vanilla install of the excellent Janus configuration of MacVim so whatever plugins are installed by default may have an affect on this.

There are a few limitations in the syntax files enabled by default so this includes a couple of matches, regions and things that really shouldn't be in a colorscheme file but I've included them because I felt like it and it was the only way to really match some of the highlighting TextMate allows (this is the thing I was referring to above).

I haven't really touched the NerdTree colouring much as it's probably impossible to have different background colours in different panes. Can't guarantee that, though.

Installation

There are probably some conventions to do with how to organise a GitHub project so that it can be automatically installed but I've just gone with sticking it in a directory called 'colors' so it can be pulled in from the root of your ~/.vim directory.

If you're using Janus, add this to ~/.janus.rake, I think it'll work:

vim_plugin_task "Cobalt.vim", "git://github.com/thingsinjars/Cobalt.vim.git"

If you're not using Janus, you probably know what you're doing anyway.

The GitHub project is here:

• github.com/thingsinjars/Cobalt.vim

Screenshots

The first of each pair is Vim, the second is the TextMate original.

Editing CSS

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Editing HTML

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Many years ago during the text-editor holy wars, I sided neither with the Vi Ninjas nor the Emacs Samurai but instead went a third way – Pico (short for Pine Composer). It was the text editing part of the e-mail program I used (Pine). For many years, this served me well. Even today, Pico's successor - Nano – is installed pretty much everywhere. It isn't , however, quite powerful enough for fast-paced web development. Serious, full-time development needs shortcuts and macros, syntax highlighting and snippets. When you spend 10 or more hours every day pressing buttons to change flashing lights, you need to optimise the way the lights flash.

After Pico, I found Crimson Editor which served me well for almost 10 years. I eventually started working on a Mac and became a TextMate user for most of the last 5 years.

In my new job, I find myself jumping from computer to computer to desktop to server quite a lot. The only constant editor available is Vi. Or Vim (Vi Improved). I've been trying to pick it up as a way to ensure I can always jump into a friendly text editor no matter where I am. Besides, these days Vim is the old-new-cool thing that all the cool-old-kids use, particularly MacVim so I thought it was worth giving it a go to see what the fuss was about.

One of the biggest deciding factors in trying it out was actually fellow Edinburgh Web Dev/International Traveller Drew Neil (@nelstrom), creator and voice of the vimcasts.org series of screencasts who is actually writing a book on Vim this very second as I write this. Most people are evangelical about their choice of text editor to the point of rabid fundamentalist, frothing-at-the-mouth, intoning-keyboard-shortcuts craziness (hence my allusions to text-editor holy wars). When I mentioned to Drew that I used Pico instead, his response was long the lines of "Fair enough". This lack of confrontation actually inspired me to try it out. Well played, sir.

Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens. If you're interested, I recommend reading Yehuda Katz' post 'Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong'. Don't worry, I'm definitely not going to try and convince anyone to use one code editor over another. You should probably stop using FrontPage, though.