George V. Reilly

Win64 port of Vim

I've ported Vim to Win64. Native binaries for AMD64 can be found on my Vim page.

In the end, it wasn't all that hard. Last weekend, I fixed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 warnings that were thrown up by the x86_amd64 cross compiler. Most of them were due to the widening of size_t (especially the value returned from strlen()) and ptrdiff_t to 64-bits. Several years ago, I went through a similar exercise in fixing these warnings for Vim6, but I never finished the port.

This week, I scrounged access to an AMD64 box at work. Today, I turned on the /Wp64 flag, which found several new, subtler problems, where pointers where being truncated to continue.

ViEmu: a vi and Vim emulator for Visual Studio

Vim vs. Visual Studio

I've been an obsessive vi user for more than 20 years. Vi keystrokes are indelibly burned into my muscle memory. When I have to use Notepad or Word or Visual Studio, I feel crippled. I have to work harder to do simple things; I have to type too many chords with Alt and Ctrl; I have to take my hands off the home keys to use the cursor keys and the mouse.

In the mid-90s, I adopted Vim (Vi IMproved) to the point where I became a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor, writing a big chunk of the Win32 code.

While I was at Microsoft, I hardly ever used Visual continue.

Windows Defender beta 2 is out

I've been using Beta-1 of Mi­crosoft­'s An­ti­Spy­ware for the last year. Beta-2 is finally out, and it's now known as Defender.

Paul Thurrot has a favorable review.

Download Defender.

Using WinDbg to debug managed code

I consider myself to be an expert WinDbg user, when it comes to debugging unmanaged x86 code. I haven't used WinDbg much on managed code, and when I did, I found it quite painful.

Via Scott Guthrie's blog, I discovered Tess Fer­ran­dez's blog. Tess is an escalation engineer in PSS who spe­cial­izes in ASP.NET and a WinDbg virtuoso. Scott has a list of her best posts. Mind-blowing stuff, but not for the faint of heart.

Changing the Console Font

I re-read Scott Hansel­man's blog post on using Consolas as the Windows Console Font, and I decided to put together a registry file to make it a little simpler. (You'll have to rename the file to console-font.reg after down­load­ing.)

The registry file includes entries for:

As Scott says:
(I'm afraid I can't distribute Consolas online or provide a download out of abject fear. That said, you can find it in any version of the Longhorn bits.)

Or Office 12, I believe.

Update, 2008/01/15. The Consolas Font Pack is the easiest way to get Consolas, if you don't have Office 2007 or Vista. Tech­ni­cal­ly, you are supposed to continue.

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