Question

I primarily use Linux at home but I have a Windows (XP) machine at work. So now I’ve got Cygwin setup and I’m interested in some Ruby programming at this point in time. I also use the Vim editor on my Linux machine so I’d like to use it as the editor on Cygwin. I’d also like Vim to be my IDE when I code Ruby stuff. I’ve read that this can be done although I am unsure how this all can setup in Cygwin (i.e. should I just install plugins? or do I need to compile Vim in Cygwin?)

Can someone help me setup Vim in Cygwin so that it can be used as an IDE for Ruby (and perhaps Python and other programming languages>?

- Cygwin version is 2.764
- Ruby (in Cygwin) version is 1.8.7

Update: What I am specifically looking for is to get something similar to installing vim-ruby or vim-nox in Debian.

Answer 1

You don’t need to use Cygwin for all this, you can just use the native Windows versions of everything:

• Vim for Windows
• Ruby for Windows

Then from Vim you can issue :!ruby hello.rb to execute the file (assuming the Ruby exe’s are in your PATH).

Since this isn’t gvim/Windows-specific you should be able to also issue this command from your CLI+Cygwin Vim and it should still work.