Vimcram - making testing vim scripts suck less

A while ago I was reading a blog post with tips on writing vim plugins. There’s lot of good information there, and if you find yourself writing any vim scripts or plugins, it’s well worth a read. I was surprised by one point though, the section on testing. My vimtodo plugin has a large number of regression tests, and it’s my safety net to make sure that I’ve not horribly broken something with my latest change. I don’t subscribe to the test driven development philosophy of writing a test and coding only until it passes, but I do find it useful to have a few tests to guard against you breaking something.

So when I read that testing sucks so much in Vim that you should avoid it, I was a little surprised, and certainly disagreed with the sentiment. My tests work fine, and I don’t recall it being particularly hard to implement the tests. So I took a look at the shell script testing tool mentioned in the blog post, cram, to see what was so special about it. I looked back at my tests in vimtodo, then at the example of the cram page, and back at my tests. The cram example showed a test that basically looked like a transcript of a shell session, and definitely not like the mess of code that comprised my tests. I thought that it couldn’t be too hard to implement something like that for vim, and the guy who wrote the blog post offered to buy a nice bottle of scotch for anyone who did so. One can never drink too much scotch (this may or may not be true), and so I got cracking.

The result is vimcram, which is now up on github. There are still a few features I’d like to add, but it’s pretty usable, and I’m currently converting all of my tests on vimtodo over to using it.

Tests in vimcram look like this:

Test substituting text:

    > Add some text
    > Add some more text
    :%s/some //
    Add text
    Add more text

Test normal mode commands

    @ggdW
    @jdW
    text
    more text

Which, while not exactly a transcript of a vim session (it’s kind of hard to do with a visual editor and multiple modes), is pretty straightforward.

If you have a vim plugin and don’t have any tests for it, give vimcram a try. It might make test writing easy enough that you actually write them!