You are hereBlogs / David Grant's blog / Stay Away from Cream/Vim for Windows

Stay Away from Cream/Vim for Windows


By David Grant - Posted on 24 July 2007

I have had endless problems since I tried using Cream (a bunch of crap on top of gvim). Here are some of them:

  • Disconnect between buffers and tabs; all buffers are not always shown.
  • The tabbed windows feature seems to stop working randomly and collapse to one tab, when I open a new document in Cream/Vim
  • Copy and paste from another windows program into Cream does not work nicely. CTRL-V is supposed to work but that spits out a weird character instead. Selecting "paste" from the edit menu does work.
  • cream-user.vim does not want to load my python.vim file for some reason (this is not a case of me not having it in the right directory or anyting, vim opens it just fine. Cream says "cannot open python.vim")
  • Repeatedly decides to tell me that a swap file already exists for some file when it doesn't. This has nothing to do with which file it is. Seems to happen whenever I open more than 1 document in the same Cream/Vim window.
  • Default cream mode sucks, there is no hjkl navigation. So I have to switch to Cream Lite mode. And in order to stop it from warning me about Cream Lite mode every time I boot it tells me to edit a .vim file somewhere in Program Files\vim-cream\?
  • I have to put my settings in a cream-user.vim file in some folder under Documents and Settings?

No cream with my Vim thanks. All the above problems disappear if I use plain gvim.

Tags

I do use vim and I have quite a few problems with it. But to me gvim is really quite bad in terms of a gui applications. It adds very little by bringing along a gui.

Perhaps I'll try cream and see if it's any better. And probably run into the same issues you did.

CTRL+V inserts control characters by default in Vim. i.e. type CTRL+V CTRL+X in Insert mode and you'll insert a literal ^X (one character). Is that what it was doing? I know GVim in "Windows mode" overrides this to paste, but inserting control characters is the proper default. You could try Shift+Insert for paste. Or the Vim way, in normal mode type "+p.

I don't think I want any Cream either, but only because Vim is nice enough to begin with. :) Cream doesn't sound too appealing.

Yeah gvim handles it properly out of the box and cream screws it up. No big deal, but IMHO cream should be a super set of vim and key features like cut/copy and paste should behave the same as vim out-of-the-box.

I'm not sure who Cream is trying to appeal to. I mean the hjkl navigation doesn't even work out of the box?

I agree - I just want to uninstall Cream and install gvim without losing my gvim settings.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <blockquote> <s> <img> <h2> <h3>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>. The supported tag styles are: <foo>, [foo].
  • Insert Google Map macro.
  • Images can be added to this post.
  • You may use [inline:xx] tags to display uploaded files or images inline.
  • You may use [view:name=display=args] tags to display views.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
Sorry I had to add this test to combat the spam problem.
2
N
j
r
A
K
Enter the code without spaces and pay attention to upper/lower case.