[Info-vax] cobol.vim for VIM

[Hein, Nashua NH]

Re LSE discussion... irrelevant to me. I'm well aware of it.

I want two things from VIm.

- Main keyboard only editing, no keypad or function keys
Emacs can offer that, but VI is more generally available on customer
systems I need to work on.
- Language syntax highlighting.
On my windoze systems I just use the 'Crimson Editor for that'.
Give tokens/keywords/strings/constants and comments all their own
color.
VIM (and Crimson) do a reasonable job for C.
They also do parenthesis/braces matching.

While VIM helps, it makes editing a bit of a videogame.
A lot of elements flash and change color as you type along.
I'm not sure I want to deal with that long term.
Crimsom does not suffer that as much, perhaps simply thanks to more
subtle default color choices.

IMHO, If you are a dug-in EDT/TPU user, then you should really pull
your head out of sand some day
and try a more visual editing environment for a while, be that VIM
some windoze tool.
You can then choose not to use it, that's fine with me, but you should
try it seriously before you knock it.
It nicely reduces 'run-away strings', missing closing parens, and
surprise comments and such for me,
but then others may never suffer from those.

The Cobol language does not offer as many opportunities to help, but
still some.
Now that I looked at it again, I realzie the this silly Crimson tool
has also been doing random keyword highlighting for sub-strings in
variable names.

 (btw.. I have a simple DCL language definition for Crimson if anyone
cares).

Cheers,
Hein.