Vim and Elixir

My mental landscape is dotted with the decaying husks of half-learned programming languages. The latest of these is Elixir, a functional programming language built on Erlang VM:

It is a dynamic language with flexible syntax with macros support that leverages Erlang’s abilities to build concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant applications with hot code upgrades.

While it’s fun to try out new languages, it can be a painful process if the tools aren’t up to snuff. Fortunately, like Go, the Elixir authors were quick to write syntax files and plugins for popular editors. Vim Elixir includes syntax highlighting, filetype detection, and auto indentation. It’s hosted on GitHub, so it’s easy to install with Pathogen or Vundle.

The highlighting looks clean and Omni completion seems to work as well.

There’s also mix.vim, which adds support for Elixir’s build tool. Typing :Mix will run the default mix task, or a command if one is supplied as the first argument. Other handy functions are included, like :Mdeps get for updating out of date dependencies.

So, if you’re interested in trying out Elixir, you’re good to go with Vim.