Vimball 28b

Vimball is a vim-based archiver that builds, extracts, and previews.

The vimball plugin facilitates creating, extracting , and listing the contents of "vimball" archives (*.vba).

CREATING A VIMBALL

Vimball can create a "vimball" archive (*.vba) with the following command:

:[range]MkVimball[!] filename

As an example:

plugin/something.vim
doc/something.txt
:%MkVimball something

will create a "vimball.vba" archive. Each line in the range processed by the MkVimball command simply describes where in the usual vim directory tree various files are.

EXTRACTING FROM A VIMBALL

Users of a vimball archive simply need to

:vim something.vba
:so %

and the contents of the vimball will be extracted and placed into the proper directories, no matter where the user opened up the vimball. Furthermore, the helptags command will be automatically and transparently used to make any doc/*.txt files' contents available by the Vim help system.

PREVIEWING A VIMBALL

Instead of immediately sourcing a vimball to extract its contents, one may use

:VimballList

to preview the contents of the vimball archive.

Requirements:

· Vim

INSTALLATION:

1. Remove all vestiges of any older version of vimball. Typically, that means:
cd /usr/local/share/vim/vim70
rm plugin/vimball*.vim
rm autoload/vimball*.vim

2. Change directory to the directory holding the plugin/ and autoload/ directories where you want to install vimball. It is probably best to install the new vimball in the distribution directory.
gunzip vimball.tar.gz
tar -oxvf vimball.tar
chmod a+r autoload/vimball.vim doc/pi_vimball.txt plugin/vimballPlugin.vim

Product's homepage