Introducing srht.vim

Sourcehut is a free and open source platform to develop software. It provides different services like git hosting, issue tracking, continuous integration and mailing-lists. This platform also offers secondary services such as a “pastebin-like” tool named paste.sr.ht.

As a long-time and frequent GitHub user, I use two essential vim plugins to collaborate:

• vim-fugitive: I use the :GBrowse command to share a code snippet or an entire file, usually during a discussion (in combination with fzf.vim to quickly find what I am looking for).
• vim-gist: this plugin allows me to create gists from within vim by typing <esc>:Gi<tab><enter>. I share git diffs, various drafts, notes, etc. I configured this plugin so that it creates a private gist by default and puts the URL into the system’s clipboard. It’s very effective!

When I started to use sourcehut, I couldn’t use :GBrowse anymore and, when I asked for help on IRC once, some folks told me about the paste service (I shared GitHub’s gists as I normally do and I am not sure they liked it). Writing a vim plugin was on my todo-list for a while. I wrote some sort of plugins in the past but nothing really serious.

There we are. I wrote srht.vim, a plugin for interacting with some sourcehut services. This plugin allows to use :GBrowse with sourcehut git repositories when vim-fugitive is installed, and it provides a :SrhtPaste command, similar to vim-gist. The latter is heavily inspired by the work of Yasuhiro Matsumoto, the author of the vim-gist plugin, for two reasons: (1) I am so used to the :Gist command that I wanted a similar “user interface”, i.e. same command arguments and messages, and (2) the author writes excellent vim plugins (I really needed some concrete examples to follow after having read Learn Vimscript the Hard Way).

srht.vim can be installed using any package manager (I think) but I personally use Vim’s built-in package support (see :help packages). Both curl and the webapi-vim plugin are needed, too (it might change in the future).

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/willdurand/start
$ cd !$
$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~willdurand/srht.vim
$ vim -u NONE -c "helptags srht.vim/doc" -c q

The current state of this plugin is enough for my needs but the :SrhtPaste command is way less powerful than the :Gist one and the :GBrowse integration might not handle some edge cases very well. Get in touch if you want to use this plugin but it doesn’t work for you right now, though.

Depending on how sourcehut evolves in the future, I’d like to add omni-completion to reference issues in commit messages, which is another feature (from vim-rhubarb) that I use very often!

Let me know if you have ideas to further improve my first vim plugin. Cheers!