Vim made easy: how to get your favorite IDE features in Vim

The open source Vim text editor offers a significant amount of power and flexibility, but it can be difficult to configure properly. In this tutorial, we will show you several easy ways to make Vim behave more like a conventional integrated development environment.<BR><BR><a href='http://meincmagazine.com/open-source/guides/2009/05/vim-made-easy-how-to-get-your-favorite-ide-features-in-vim.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[rick_h]

My list of required vim plugins<BR><BR>snipMate: awesome snippets lib<BR>git-vim: git commands/display in vim buffers<BR>vim-git-branch-info: branch info in status line<BR>bufexplorer.vim: mapped to <leader>b for buffer listing<BR>dpaste.vim: send to pastebin<BR>NERD_tree.vim: for a file listing/ide-like tree<BR>SimpleFold.vim: folding fun <BR>tasklist.vim: eclipse like pulling of @todo/@fixme stuff<BR>tComment.vim: great comment plugin. Select a ton of text and gc will comment, detects filetype

 

[emallson]

I recommend the Zenburn color scheme for vim. It's very nice. It's also been ported to Notepad++ and emacs (I think).<BR><BR>http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburnpage/

 

[ungood++]

One question - What's the difference between Vim and Emacs?

 

[Archangel Mychael]

Sweet jesus. So when I read that plugins were available for vim I thought, "Hell yeah! I'll get all kinds of features and really rice out my install." Then I went through some of the motions to try and install these plugins. Yeah I think I'll pass.

 

[Ancalagon]

If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE?

 

[zeotherm]

<blockquote class="ip-ubbcode-quote">
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div>
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by ungood++:<br>One question - What's the difference between Vim and Emacs? </div>
</blockquote>
<br><br>Emacs is superior -- View image here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/forum/smilies/gavel.gif --<br><br>-- View image here: http://episteme.meincmagazine.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif --

 

[Trout Mask Replica]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Some people are adverse to the GUI. Scares 'em away with all those intimidating buttons. Much better to memorize 9-finger key commands. <BR><BR>On a more serious note... doing modern development in a command-line editor is rather painful, but, opinion and assholes and all that. We all have one. On the flip side, vim is pretty handy when ssh'd to points elsewhere.

 

[Manic Miner]

I'm not sure I remember all of the VI commands I used to know but I do remember it was the bees knees when it came to doing search and replace and having multiple cut and paste buffers. What could be more natural than keying in ":s/^find/replace/g"<BR><BR>It was also super speedy, something that could never be said about emacs.<BR><BR>VIM on the command line was close enough to VI I never had to worry about the differences and it was a nice confortable tool to use. VIM in a GUI - my only question would be why? There are certainly better editor on Windows and MAC OS.

 

[sonicdeath]

Edit: awesome article btw!! keep 'em coming =)<BR><BR><BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content"><BR>One question - What's the difference between Vim and Emacs? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Having not used Emacs, I'd be interested in a reply to this too.<BR><BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Because a modern IDE usually has you using the mouse. As soon as you touch the mouse, you are less efficient =)<BR><BR>I think being able to do everything with the keyboard makes you a lot more efficient once you learn vim or emacs. You will type far less, move around far quicker, and just be a lot *faster* than you would be otherwise. I don't know about your modern IDE, but I don't think it lets you do even a fraction of the things you can do with vim (such as batching regular expressions).<BR><BR>The learning curve is kinda steep... but it helps if you treat it like learning anything else and learn a little bit each day. GVim definitely eases the pain, but encourages bad habits like using the mouse too (which I think is forgivable for using the menus at the top, but not so much for editing).<BR><BR>Vim is probably a lot more customizable than your modern IDE.<BR><BR>You can use vim for much more than just coding.

 

[hd580]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Or equip a modern IDE with VIM and have both, e.g., viemu http://www.viemu.com/, viplugin http://www.viplugin.com/

 

[rick_h]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Vim with plugins is a LOT less than the 800mb of Ram usage eclipse used to eat up on a good day. Buffers > tabs any day of the week, and once you get used to the movement/shortcuts it's so much nicer to have the full window for code and move around so much faster/easier. <BR><BR>I spent 5 years using Zend Studio/Eclipse/Wing IDE, etc. finally combined them all under vim last June and not looked back.

 

[Minstrel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Some people are adverse to the GUI. Scares 'em away with all those intimidating buttons. Much better to memorize 9-finger key commands. <BR> </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>It's fully Frodo-compliant

 

[jwbaker]

There's also http://www.vimplugin.org/ for Eclipse. Vimplugin is not the same as viplugin.

 

[Andreas_kc]

:q!

 

[Zhengyi]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by ungood++:<BR>One question - What's the difference between Vim and Emacs? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Assuming you're not attempting to restart that old war....<BR><BR>Both are highly extensible; emacs via Lisp (indeed, Emacs is basically a Lisp machine that happens to be able to edit text), and Vim via your choice of Perl, Python, and Ruby.<BR><BR>Vim is modal, Emacs isn't. Practically, this means that in Vim you're banging on the ESC key a lot, whereas in Emacs you're frequently playing twister with the CTL, ALT, SHIFT keys.<BR><BR>That's about it.

 

[Tundro Walker]

Pfft... ANYONE can use Vim and Emacs to code something. But REAL programmers use Small Basic. -- View image here: http://episteme.meincmagazine.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif --

 

[kaldec]

I miss the good old days, when vim was vi with arrow keys. I could open a file, edit, and close in the time it took emacs to open the file.<BR><BR>Now vim is as bloated as emacs, and every release has me scrambling to find out how to turn off 10 new auto-magic features that corrupt simple operations. *barf*

 

[thebackwash]

Having recently become much more proficient with the command-line environment, (now almost daily writing my own scripts,) I'll vouch for its continued relevance, and charming simplicity. I like the fact that almost everything I want to do can be done, almost without a thought, through muscle memory, once I do it 2 or 3 times. It is much less cluttered than having a jillion applications with a jillion different windows open, because otherwise, I'd have like 25 windows open just in the text editor, not to mention other things.<BR><BR>I will profess a taste for emacs over vi, just because emacs, though archaic-seeming, seems well-organized given the limitations of a terminal window, while vi always seemed like "hell, throw in something else to the command buffer." It seems to pile on the arcana for 80s-nostalgia sake. No thanks.<BR><BR>And I use the GUI version of neither. They're in a CLI to cut down on the clutter and the visual overhead, or to save the visual overhead for things that just don't flow in the terminal (a LOT of things!)<BR><BR>EDIT: And I definitely disagree with the notion that the keyboard is faster for everything, or even most things, or that "you just have to get more familiar with it." It's definitely faster for some things, but the mouse isn't just around for the loser idiots—it actually has a purpose, and fills that purpose quite well. I like the power and flexibility that I'm finding in the CLI, but it's obvious that some things could be made easier if using the mouse were an option. (I like the alt-key navigability of Windows programs, and I'm a mac guy.)

 

[toastydirt]

Diff between Vim and Emacs?<BR>It all depends on how you want to interact with the file you're editing. The different interfaces (commands) make sense to different people. I agree with Zhengyi - Vim is ESC and :command while Emacs is CTRL, ALT, SHIFT twister. <BR><BR>In Emacs, the cursor is live and you simply start typing to edit - just like MS Word. In Vim, the default is simply viewing the file and you enter a command to start editing. Press "i" to start inserting text before the cursor or "a" to append text after the cursor. Press "d" to start deleting. "u" for undo, CTRL-r to redo, and so on. I find those commands far easier to remember and execute than the finger twister CTRL sequences in Emacs.<BR><BR>Viewing your a list of your open files (buffers) in Vim seems quite easy to me, at least for my GVim install in IBM AIX (Vim v7.0). ":ls" shows me the buffers - just like "ls" in a shell/term window to list files. Then if I want the file in buffer 3, I just type ":b3".

 

[akitaonrails]

If you want to have all the juicy features without having to think too much, read this: http://www.akitaonrails.com/20...ls-on-windows-part-2<BR><BR>You will need to install ncurses-term, exuberant-ctags, ruby and you will have a Textmate-like environment, with several plugins and snippets pre-configured.

 

[lamestlamer]

I tend to use Emacs for development and vim for basic editing. They both can do the same things, but I found emacs easier to set up for cpp development than vim. My coworker's machine that I need to ssh into frequently has vim set up for development, so I use vim then. They both require several hours of using a cheat sheet before you can become faster with them than with an IDE. VIM would work better with the escape key on the home row and Emacs would work better with the mode keys on the home row. If you could hold down combinations of home row keys to set the context then they would be faster, but I don't think that keyboards allow that.

 

[jonabbey]

Ditto. I use emacs for all large scale code editing, and vim for all quick work on editing configuration files, and the like.<BR><BR>What surprises me is how good GNU Emacs has gotten. I was an XEmacs acolyte for years, but GNU's emacs is far and away superior these days, while XEmacs has stagnated.<BR><BR>It also surprises me how much vim has supplanted vi everywhere. Especially considering vim was born on the Amiga. ;-)

 

[Pamel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">it can be somewhat intimidating for new users </div></BLOCKQUOTE> Understatement of the year. You shouldn't have to do Google searches to figure out how to get out of your text editor. Unfortunately I'm terrible at memorizing 10,000 obscure key presses to do everything under the sun so I have to use other editors. I can see the speed advantages though for those that don't have an issue with such memorization.

 

[jwbaker]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Pamel:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">it can be somewhat intimidating for new users </div></BLOCKQUOTE> Understatement of the year. You shouldn't have to do Google searches to figure out how to get out of your text editor. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Ha! A popular code editor on VMS was "ls" and Unix-using morons like me would telnet into a VMS machine, type "ls" to list our files, and be stuck forever in this stupid editor. To this day I still have no idea how to exit that editor, other than killing the terminal session.

 

[GohanIYIan]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Trout Mask Replica:<BR>On a more serious note... doing modern development in a command-line editor is rather painful, but, opinion and assholes and all that. We all have one. On the flip side, vim is pretty handy when ssh'd to points elsewhere. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>All from ssh, IMO. You can end up using vi that way a lot when it's just a quick little change or your current 'net connection makes remote desktop painful or whatever. Spend too much time doing this and you learn the keystrokes - then it's hard to use a "normal" editor without hammering on escape and leaving stray Js and Ks and colons all over the place. That's been my experience, anyway.<BR><BR>I do dream of the day someone manages to shoehorn vim into Visual Studio as the text editor without breaking intellisense. I'd be pretty damn happy with that as a setup.

 

[ronelson]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Aside from vim still being in active development, I assume you are talking about a GUI? Yeah, they sure work great over a 9600 baud modem into a flaky line in Italy.

 

[Slackwise]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by kaldec:<BR>I miss the good old days, when vim was vi with arrow keys. I could open a file, edit, and close in the time it took emacs to open the file.<BR><BR>Now vim is as bloated as emacs, and every release has me scrambling to find out how to turn off 10 new auto-magic features that corrupt simple operations. *barf* </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>echo "set compatible" > ~/.vimrc<BR><BR>Now Vim will act more like vi and won't source vimrc in $VIM (usually /usr/share/vim), which is where all those fancy "auto-magic" features come from when you don't have a ~/.vimrc.

 

[Dunlavy]

How is this better than Notepad++?

 

[THX]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Dunlavy:<BR>How is this better than Notepad++? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Looks like it's harder to use, so it's more l33t

 

[Dunlavy]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by THX:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Dunlavy:<BR>How is this better than Notepad++? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Looks like it's harder to use, so it's more l33t </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Gotcha. I favor being 1337 in my gaming - not the kind of 1337 that hurts my productivity from using antiquated or hard-to-use tools from the Cretaceous period of computing.

 

[d_jedi]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>++<BR>Visual Studio (and Eclipse for Java) FTW.

 

[tlhIngan]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Trout Mask Replica:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Ancalagon:<BR>If you want the features of a modern IDE in your vim, why dont you, I dont know, use a modern IDE? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Some people are adverse to the GUI. Scares 'em away with all those intimidating buttons. Much better to memorize 9-finger key commands. <BR><BR>On a more serious note... doing modern development in a command-line editor is rather painful, but, opinion and assholes and all that. We all have one. On the flip side, vim is pretty handy when ssh'd to points elsewhere. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>It also keeps people from touching your computer, I find.<BR><BR>I work on Windows, and I much prefer using GVim on Win32 than the assinine editor that comes with Visual Studio. (Alas, as of Visual Studio.net, they broke VisVim which opened files in Vim instead of Visual Studio's editor).<BR><BR>It's a choice - I know IBM has a really nice tutorial on vi/vim, and Vim has its own built-in tutorial. <BR><BR>And I like Vim's keystrokes - a lot better than the ctrl-alt-shift-meta-bucky-cokebottle combinations you get with Emacs. Selecting text, then reformatting it or adding characters and transformations is just a few keys away. And there's probably a trillion keystrokes I can use to do what I want, but combining the basic ones you need I find gets you 99% of what you want.<BR><BR>My favorite was re-learning how to make use of "i" - do it right, and you can easily transform a prototype into a function body automatically by using "." to repeat the insertion. Complete with your favorite spacing and indentation.<BR><BR>It's a personal choice - a lot of people like the simplicity of Notepad like editors in most IDEs, others like being able to navigate around the file without touching the mouse. Fun also doing big block deletions at times - you see people selecting it per-block and backspacing to remove the block, while I just search for the separator and "dn" to delete to next selection.<BR><BR>If it wasn't for GVim for Windows, I really won't have one editor across every platform...

 

[drag]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Dunlavy:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by THX:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Dunlavy:<BR>How is this better than Notepad++? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Looks like it's harder to use, so it's more l33t </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Gotcha. I favor being 1337 in my gaming - not the kind of 1337 that hurts my productivity from using antiquated or hard-to-use tools from the Cretaceous period of computing. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Horsepooie.<BR><BR>Vim is a highly evolved and efficient tool. Very fast*, very good at what it's designed for. If you can't wrap your head around the concept of a dual mode editor and that 'j' means 'down' and 'k' means 'up' then that is your problem. <BR><BR>* fast as in 'the speed at which works gets done', not 'how long it takes to refresh the screen'.<BR><BR>If you have a complex script on a remote machine you need to edit and you want to get it done _now_ then Vim can deliver a highly productive and all the immediate text-editing features you'd want on the fly. No setting up projects, no importing code, no integrating SCMS, no nothing. <BR><BR>ssh-in, edit, test it, exit, done.<BR><BR>In the time it takes for a person to navigate around and get a IDE started up and the code in question loaded... I am already done and heading down to the break room to get a bag of Cool Ranch Duritos and a Diet Coke.<BR><BR>---------------<BR><BR><BR>You have to understand the target audiance is system administrators and scripters. Sure there are a lot of programmers that use it for complex coding, but the majority of people are people that simply want to get things done and don't have projects that run on for weeks at a time. Features that don't require a lot of setup, like language-sensitive syntax highlighting and autocompletion are the most valuable.<BR><BR>For programmers who have long-term projects they are working on then IDEs or Emacs are preferable. Those require lots of setup and time to get going and offer the most features for managing code and documentation. <BR><BR>And Emacs isn't just a text editor.. it's probably the first IDE that ever got very popular. Sure it pretends to be a text editor, but it's about as useful for system administration and scripting as notepad is without the devoting a great deal of time customizing it to their specific needs. In fact the only way it's very useful is if you run Emacs in 'server-mode' so that when you edit files they are loaded up into a existing program with whatever else your working on.<BR><BR><BR>edit:<BR><BR>Oh, if your editor requires me to use either:<BR>A) the mouse<BR>or<BR>B) the arrow keys<BR><BR>For _anything_. Then I am not going to touch it with a twenty foot pole.

 

[ronelson]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">How is this better than Notepad++? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>It has little to do with being "better" than simply being available. You did notice that this was posted in the Open Source section which tends to focus on non-Windows platforms, right?

 

[TechGeek]

For all those wondering about why people use Vi or VIM or Emacs rather than a full IDE in X, there is one simple reason. When you are on a box with almost nothing else, you will usually have Vi. It is pretty much a universal standard on any Unix like machine and it may be the only tool you have to edit a file. At my university, learning Vi and bash is the first step in the system administration sequence and is a fundamental skill for the major.

 

[Transparent]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by ungood++:<BR>One question - What's the difference between Vim and Emacs? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>I think it's generally agreed that:<BR><BR>Emacs would be a great operating system if only it had a decent text editor, whereas vi would be a great text editor if only it had a decent operating system

 

[Pamel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by TechGeek:<BR>When you are on a box with almost nothing else, you will usually have Vi. </div></BLOCKQUOTE> Yeah, but having Nano installed is even more common, and infinitely more user friendly.

 

[ronelson]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Yeah, but having Nano installed is even more common, and infinitely more user friendly. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>HP-UX, Solaris, and even Fedora Core would beg to differ about the availability.

 

[bersl2]

<blockquote class="ip-ubbcode-quote">
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div>
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by lamestlamer:<br>I tend to use Emacs for development and vim for basic editing. They both can do the same things, but I found emacs easier to set up for cpp development than vim. My coworker's machine that I need to ssh into frequently has vim set up for development, so I use vim then. They both require several hours of using a cheat sheet before you can become faster with them than with an IDE. VIM would work better with the escape key on the home row and Emacs would work better with the mode keys on the home row. If you could hold down combinations of home row keys to set the context then they would be faster, but I don't think that keyboards allow that. </div>
</blockquote>
<br><br>If you ever wanted to undertake the Herculean task that is understanding XKB, you can make the keyboard act however you want (though, not per-program). You want to exchange Left Control and Caps Lock? There's a preset for that. Want to do the same for Escape and Caps Lock? Completely doable. There isn't any official documentation worth a damn, but there is the nice An Unreliable Guide to XKB Configuration. Of course, this only works in X.<br><br><blockquote class="ip-ubbcode-quote">
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div>
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Pamel:<br><blockquote class="ip-ubbcode-quote">
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div>
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by TechGeek:<br>When you are on a box with almost nothing else, you will usually have Vi. </div>
</blockquote> Yeah, but having Nano installed is even more common, and infinitely more user friendly. </div>
</blockquote>
<br>I told somebody a couple of days ago that I wish he died and went to hell, where his GUI-loving ass would be forced to use ed for the rest of eternity. -- View image here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/forum/smilies/devious.gif --