Configure VIM for Syntax Highlighting of Taskwarrior Data


The task data files (pending.data, completed.data and undo.data),
configuration file (.taskrc) as well as edits made via commands like "task 1
edit" can be color-highlighted if you happen to use VIM as your preferred text
editor.  Eventually this will happen automatically in newer versions of VIM,
but for now you have to do a little bit of file shuffling.


                                Prerequisites

For this to work, you need to first have syntax highlighting enabled when you
use VIM.  This happens to be the default for most VIM installations, but it is
usually quite simple if that doesn't happen to be so in your case.  Rather
than repeat the excellent VIM documentation here, please see the appropriate
VIM documentation itself.  Generally this can be made seen by starting
vim/gvim and issuing the following command:

    :help syntax

You may prefer instead to read the help online at:
    http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#syntax


              Configuring VIM to Understand Taskwarrior Data

Once you have VIM's syntax highlighting enabled and working with other file
types properly, configuring it for use with taskwarrior is simple.  You simply
need to copy some files that came with taskwarrior into your home directory so
that you have:

    ~/.vim/ftdetect/task.vim
    ~/.vim/syntax/taskdata.vim
    ~/.vim/syntax/taskedit.vim
    ~/.vim/syntax/taskrc.vim

The source of these files varies depending on how you installed task.  If you
installed task via a regular package (rpm or deb) you can find these files in
/usr/share/doc/task-VERSION/scripts/vim/.  If you built task yourself from the
tarball (using the default configure options), these will be in
/usr/local/share/doc/task-VERSION/scripts/vim/ instead.  So you should be able
to do one of the following:

    cp -av /usr/share/doc/task-VERSION/scripts/vim/* ~/.vim/

or

    cp -av /usr/local/share/doc/task-VERSION/scripts/vim/* ~/.vim/

You should then be ready to go.
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All four above mentioned files are

Copyright 2009-2010 John Florian

and are available under the GNU Public License version 2 or later.
For the full text of this license, see COPYING.