How can I set up Vim for Android development?

Question

Can anyone describe a good Vim setup for Android Development? I'm using Eclipse for now but I would really like to use Vim because it's faster and I like it better. I'm not interested in Eclim for example.

I'm interested in what Vim plugins are used (for Java, autocomplete etc.), how the .vimrc looks like and how the whole process of building/running applications works (as efficiently as possible).

Answer 1

I've once had to do some Android development on a netbook, and set up a nice Vim setup for this purpose. Seriously, it's easier than it seems:

• Run emulator from the command line. It's better to do it anyway. I started mine with something like this:

  emulator -avd BlaDevice -no-boot-anim -scale 0.65 -show-kernel

• To build and reinstall your modified app to the emulator, simply run ant reinstall from the project root. Map this command in Vim to your key combination of choice.

• I've used typical Vim setup: NERDTree, FuzzyFinder, and omnicomplete. Java syntax highlighting works out of the box.

• Never bothered to install Eclim, omnicomplete works just fine in most cases.

Answer 2

I have been working on a vim plugin for android development: https://github.com/hsanson/vim-android. Still work in progress but it has most functionality needed for android development using vim.

I still have some issues to solve but most are not related to the plugin:

• Gradle errors from aapt report the wrong file. This makes jumping to the error from the quickfix window a pain as it opens the wrong file.
• I cannot make javacomplete work correctly. When auto completing a class I wrote it gets stuck in "Searching..." and when auto completing a library or external JAR method javacomplete spits hundreds of errors making it impossible to use.