How can I use VIM to do .Net Development

Question

Visual Studio is the defacto editor, but what are our other options that avoid a heavy UI while still integrating with a C# build chain?

Looking for options which preferably use vi or vim directly, and those which emulate some or all of the functionality of vi and/or vim.

Solution 1

I'm not connected with the company in any way, but I've heard very good things about ViEmu. If the price were a little lower, I'd get it myself, because I love the editing power of Vim.

Solution 2

Here is a guide on Vim C# compiling.

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In response to the comments -

It sounds like your goal is to have a fully functional IDE that works cross platform for C# development, not necessarily to use VIM. If that's the case, you can use MonoDevelop on all platforms (including Windows, but that's a bit trickier), and since you're probably already using the mono compilers on your other platforms, this might be a nicer option.

Solution 3

Right now there's now something called OpenIDENet from ContinuousTests https://github.com/continuoustests/OpenIDE This along with AutoTestNet and EditorEngine provide a seamless Test Driven Development tooling for VIM.

EditorEngine gives AutoTest capabilities & commandline interactions to VIM ( ie. adding references, new projects to a solution etc. )

AutoTest does the heavy lifting by compiling on save; as it watches a directory. It also feeds back when tests fail.

The main page provides a video demonstration & howto for this tooling. Also on windows NuGet is now available to be used from the commandline too.

I must point out that I do not work for continuoustests or get any money or favor from them, it's just that they produce awesome software for developing with.

Solution 4

MSBuild is a very powerful analog to Ant.

Use msbuild project files to manage your .NET projects, and write a nmake file that calls msbuild.

Map your vi make command to nmake

You can just use :make to do a build

Solution 5

If you are on the latest versions of VS, then the solution files can be built with MSBuild, which is basically a NAnt equivalent.

Otherwise, call csc to compile the files yourself.

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Comments

[John Weldon]

Tab specifically wanted to avoid shelling out to devenv...

[Reed Copsey]

Not much else in the way of options, using VIM directly.

[John Weldon]

ya, except for msbuild, which rocks!

[Reed Copsey]

you're still going out to a command line for msbuild, though....

[Tab]

I have coded with vs.net ide since it was a beta in MS's eyes - I am interested in having the same experience across all platforms.

[Tab]

I imagine I could call msbuild at some command level and pass .proj (msbuild files) files

[Tab]

I can live going out to a command line tool like csc.exe, etc - I just did NOT see the value in letting all my memory getting sucked into the ms whirlpool (spell that right?) everytime I want to compile

[Tab]

to Reed - see my comment under the original question

[Tab]

Reed - This is was very helpful - mostly what I was looking for - thanks to John Weldon for his comments as well.

[Daniel]

I tried the trial a while back (6-12 months ago). I was impressed but it doesn't offer all the vim commands you're used to. It was a little frustrating to switch mentally to 'I'm editing with VI but only a subset of the commands'

[Fildor]

Late Addendum: git-scm comes with a quite complete bash and tools - including vim. I use it for my todo.txt cli and it works great.