In the part 1 and part 2 I talked about some useful vim settings and how to enable autocompletion in vim. In this part I am going to talk about a very useful plugin written by Tobias Schlitt, for generating comment blocks or docblocks for php scripts.
We do document our code with proper inline comments. To make this task easier, Tobias Schlitt wrote a VIM plugin which automatically lookup some characteristics of the item you want to document and creates a docblock skeleton for it. This plugin provides functions to generate documentation blocks for your PHP code. The script currently documents:
- Classes
- Methods/Functions
- Attributes
This plugin supports PHP 4 and 5 syntax elements. It also allows you to define default values for phpDocumentor tags like @version, @author, @license and so on. For function/method parameters and attributes, the script tries to guess the type as good as possible from PHP5 type hints or default values (array, bool, int, string etc).
Steps to install this plugin
- Download the plugin file (php-doc.vim) from here.
- After downloading just place the php-doc.vim file in ~/.vim/plugin/ folder
- Add folowing lines in your ~/.vimrc file
source ~/.vim/plugin/php-doc.vim
inoremap <c-p> <esc>:call PhpDocSingle()<cr>i
nnoremap <c-p> :call PhpDocSingle()<cr>
vnoremap <c-p> :call PhpDocRange()<cr>
This includes the script and maps the combination <ctrl> + p to the doc functions.
How to use
Just hit <ctrl>+p on the line where the element to document resides and the doc block will be created directly above that line.
For other posts related to VIM settings and plugins you can also visit
Some useful settings and plugins for VI Editor : Part 1 - General settings
Some useful settings and plugins for VI Editor : Part 2 - Autocompletion
Some useful settings and plugins for VI Editor : Part 4 - CodeSniffer Integration
Some useful settings and plugins for VI Editor : Part 5 - Comment a code block
