Yesterday I decided I’d make a start on learning C as I’d like to be able to hack Shoes a bit. So the first thing I needed to sort out was a build environment as there’s no such loveliness as IRB. I already had the WDK (previously, DDK) build environment installed for building Shoes so figured that I should also be able to use this for plain C, but just didn’t know how (the only things I’ve ever typed are rake and make). Thankfully someone else had documented how to use WDK to build C programs so I was all set to go.

That was until I stumbled across this cryptic error message trying to build: “fatal error U1087: cannot have : and :: dependents for same target”. Turns out this is because the path I was using had a space in it. This would be because I was using something along the lines of “D:\Users\me\My Friggin’ Documents\code". You know the whole “My Documents” thing that Windows pushes on you (and while I’m at it why are “My Pictures”, “My Videos”, etc indside “My Documents”?!!). Had it been a home PC (well apart from the fact I wouldn’t have been using Windows in the first place) I gather this would have been simple to fix, but as it was it meant searching through the registry and making changes in mutliple entries (Shell Folders) so I could finally eliminate “My Documents” (hmmm, why not just “Documents” in the first place?) and while I was at it reorganise my “Home” directory into a much more sensible layout. I guess it shouldn’t have come as a suprise that the hardest bit about setting out to learn C would be using bloody Windows.

Anyway, with that out of the way I set off to find some handy Vim plugins to help me with C:

Didn’t bother with:

  • c.vim I reckon SnipMate will get me most of this, and it’ll get too confusing using more than one snippet style plugin.