The sparkup plugin for vim lets you write HTML markup faster by Zen Coding, in which you write short code, resembling CSS selectors, which is then expanded to HTML by the editor. For example, writing

div#nav>ul#menu>li.item*3

would give you:

<div id="nav">
    <ul id="menu">
        <li class="item"></li>
        <li class="item"></li>
        <li class="item"></li>
    </ul>
</div>

This is obviously extremely useful, as it saves a lot of typing. However, I encountered a bit of trouble using this plugin on my laptop, which runs on Arch Linux. It’s easily solved though. Continue reading →