The Vim text editor includes the script 2html.vim which can be used to convert a syntax highlighted buffer in Vim to an HTML document that, when viewed in a web browser, should look exactly the same. After using that script for a while and discovering the excellent Exuberant Ctags I wondered "Wouldn't it be nice to have those tags converted to hyperlinks when I publish source code as HTML?".
After several attempts I managed a working prototype, but it was quite rough around the edges and I didn't really have the time or interest to clean it up. Several months later I found myself with some free time and a renewed interest in Vim scripting so I decided to clean up my code and release it. If you're wondering what the result looks like, I've published the plug-in source code as a demonstration.
Unzip the most recent ZIP archive file inside your Vim profile
directory (usually this is ~/.vim on UNIX and %USERPROFILE%\vimfiles on
Windows). As an example we'll publish the plug-in using itself. First create a
tags file that contains entries for the files you want to publish using a shell
command such as:
ctags -Rf ~/.publish_tags ~/.vim/
If this doesn't work because ctags isn't installed you can download it from
the Exuberant Ctags homepage, or if you're running Debian/Ubuntu you
can install it by executing the following shell command:
sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags
The plug-in needs an up-to-date tags file so that it can create hyperlinks
between the published files. Now start Vim and write a script that registers
the tags file you just created and calls the function Publish() as follows:
set tags=~/.publish_tags
let sources = '/home/peter/.vim'
let target = 'sftp://peterodding.com/code/vim/profile'
call Publish(sources, target, [
\ 'autoload/xolox/escape.vim',
\ 'autoload/xolox/path.vim',
\ 'autoload/publish.vim',
\ 'plugin/publish.vim',
\ ])
Change the sources and target variables to reflect your situation, save the
script as ~/publish_test.vim and execute it in Vim by typing :source
~/publish_test.vim and pressing Enter↵. If everything goes well Vim will be
busy for a moment and after that you will find a bunch of syntax highlighted,
interlinked HTML documents in the target directory!
If you have questions, bug reports, suggestions, etc. the author can be contacted at peter@peterodding.com. The latest version is available at http://peterodding.com/code/vim/publish and http://github.com/xolox/vim-publish. If you like the script please vote for it on www.vim.org.
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2010 Peter Odding <peter@peterodding.com>.