How can I set up Vim for Android development?

I have been working on a vim plugin for android development: https://github.com/hsanson/vim-android. Still work in progress but it has most functionality needed for android development using vim.

I still have some issues to solve but most are not related to the plugin:

  • Gradle errors from aapt report the wrong file. This makes jumping to the error from the quickfix window a pain as it opens the wrong file.
  • I cannot make javacomplete work correctly. When auto completing a class I wrote it gets stuck in "Searching..." and when auto completing a library or external JAR method javacomplete spits hundreds of errors making it impossible to use.

I've once had to do some Android development on a netbook, and set up a nice Vim setup for this purpose. Seriously, it's easier than it seems:

  • Run emulator from the command line. It's better to do it anyway. I started mine with something like this:

    emulator -avd BlaDevice -no-boot-anim -scale 0.65 -show-kernel

  • To build and reinstall your modified app to the emulator, simply run ant reinstall from the project root. Map this command in Vim to your key combination of choice.

  • I've used typical Vim setup: NERDTree, FuzzyFinder, and omnicomplete. Java syntax highlighting works out of the box.

  • Never bothered to install Eclim, omnicomplete works just fine in most cases.

Tags:

Vim

Android