uzziel

I originally used mkid in the vim/src directory, because silly me, I thought we were going to be looking at the VIM source code. :-P

After finding that 'lid mail' in the src directory didn't turn up anything very useful, I re-ran mkid in the vim directory and then ran 'lid mail' there, which helped me find the answer faster.

On OS X it's sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb.

I'm running on OS X and I've never gotten around to installing fink or Darwin Ports, so I grabbed the idutils package from gnu.org and compiled from source. No issues at all.

What was interesting for me in this exercise was the use of idutils - I have not used this package before, but I have used something similar - ctags. Ctags does something very similar to id-utils in that it builds up a tags file that identifies tokens in your project. The difference is that id-utils seems to work from the shell, while ctags builds up a tags file that you can reference from within VIM.

I've used ctags before and then set the 'tags' variable inside VIM to indicate where the tags file is. Then, when you're editing a file in your project and you run across a token, you can put the cursor over that token and type CTRL-] to jump to the definition of that token. The file where the token is defined will open up in a new buffer. To jump back to the file you were in previously, type CTRL-t.

I'm glad to have learned about the id-utils package and look forward to learning how to use it throughout this class.