When Google Chrome first debuted in 2008, there was some speculation about whether or not the new browser would surpass Mozilla Firefox. Fast forward three years of development and over 16 Chrome releases, and behold: The day that Chrome is more popular than Firefox might just be here today.

According to analytics firm StatCounter, Chrome passed Firefox for global market share in the month of November. Chrome came in at 25.69 percent while Firefox was used by 25.23 percent of users. Microsoft’s IE still dominates the Global share count, coming in at 40.63 percent globally for November. Looking just at the U.S., IE is still tops at 50.66 percent, Firefox is second at 20.09 percent and Chrome is at 17.3 percent.

Browser usage data from analytics firm Net Applications paints a similar picture, though the details are different. According to Net Applications November overall global browser share data, IE is first with 52.64 percent, Firefox is second at 22.14 percent and Chrome is in third place globally with 18.18 percent.

When examined on a browser version basis, the numbers and positions change yet again. For November, the desktop browser version market share according to Net Applications places Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 first with a 28.20 percent share, IE 9.0 in contrast holds a 10.25 percent share. Surprisingly IE 6.0 comes in at 8.03 percent ahead of IE 7.0 at 5.28 percent.

According to Net Applications, in second place by desktop browser version on a global basis is Google’s Chrome 15 with a 14.58 percent share. Mozilla’s top ranked browser only comes in fifth with Firefox 8.0 at a 7.27 percent share. The older Firefox 3.6 browser has a 5.28 percent share and Firefox 7 was reported at 5.22 percent.

The reason why Chrome has more usage concentrated in a single browser version has a lot to do with updates. Google employs a silent updating mechanism which automatically updates Chrome users to the latest browser version. In contrast, both Mozilla and Microsoft require users to click something in order to update to the latest browser.

In Mozilla’s case, they have also moved to a new rapid development cycle that started with the Firefox 4.0 release, leaving the 3.6 branch as a longer term-supported release. Firefox 3.6 was first released in January of 2010, while Firefox 8.0 came out in early November. Mozilla is currently planning on implementing a silent updating mechanism of its own for the Firefox 10 release due out in early 2012.

While both Net Applications and StatCounter indicate that IE leads globally with Chrome and Firefox behind, there are instances where Firefox leads. According to Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing for the open source Eclipse Foundation, at eclipse.org, Firefox is tops. Eclipse.org browser stats for Nov: FF (37.7%), Chrome (32.6%), IE (20.8%), Safari (5.3%) and Opera (2.6%) Based on 3.2m visits,” Skerret noted in a tweet.

A group of hackers has posted more than 100 email addresses and login details which it claimed to have extracted from the United Nations.

Many of the emails involved appear to belong to members of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The group, which identified itself as Teampoison, attacked the UN’s behaviour and called it a “fraud”.

A spokeswoman for the UNDP said the agency believed “an old server which contains old data” had been targeted.

“The UNDP found [the] compromised server and took it offline,” said Sausan Ghosheh.

“The server goes back to 2007. There are no active passwords listed for those accounts.

“Please note that UNDP.org was not compromised.”

‘Leak’

The details were posted on the website Pastebin under the Teampoison logo.

The message preceding the login details accused the UN of acting to “facilitate the introduction of a New World Order” and asked “United Nations, why didn’t you expect us?”

Many of the email addresses given end in undp.org, but others appear to belong to members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The poster noted that several of the accounts had “no passwords”.

The message ended with the taunt: “The question now is how? We will let the so called ‘security experts’ over at the UN figure that out… Have a Nice Day.”

The poster claimed the usernames and passwords had been sourced from the UN

Credit card attacks

The security company Sophos noted that Teampoison hackers had previously attacked the maker of the Blackberry smartphone’s website and had published private information about former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“Teampoison recently announced they were joining forces with Anonymous on a new initiative dubbed ‘Operation Robin Hood’, targeting banks and financial institutions,” the firm’s senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley wrote on Sophos’s blog.

The groups said at the time that their operation aimed to take money from credit cards and donate it to individuals and charities.

They said people would not be harmed as the banks had to refund fraudulent charges.

Teampoison added a “shoutout” to Anonymous in its UN attack posting, adding a link to a Youtube video with more information about its banking attack plan.

These latest moves serve as a reminder that so-called hacktivists are skilled and willing to collaborate to take down their targets, according to Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey’s department of computing.

“One of the big problems is that there is so much data around that people forget about their older systems that still have valuable data on them,” he said.

“The lesson here is that anything that holds any data of any value must be protected.”

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — It’s a tough economy out there, but there’s at least one skill in high demand: programming.

Industry veterans insist that almost anyone can master the basics of software coding. Now, a pair of entrepreneurs have teamed up to test that idea with a company called Codecademy, which aims to make learning to program simple and fun.

“Coding is going to be the literacy of the 21st Century, and we think we have the easiest way to do it,” says co-founder Zach Sims.

After working with a variety of startups in business development roles, Sims, who is 21, dropped out of Columbia to focus on his own venture. He teamed with Ryan Bubinski, 22, who graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer science and biophysics — and, more importantly, an extensive knowledge of programming.

Codecademy isn’t the first site out there to teach people programming skills, but Sims says its secret sauce is its focus on making training accessible and affordable.

“It’s totally different from books that are one-way learning experiences,” he says. “We think it should be more interactive, more fun than something in a book, where you read for half an hour and then you go code.”

Right now, everything on Codecademy is free. Users receive badges and points for completing lessons. The site currently has four multi-part courses available — a “coding 101″ class and three JavaScript trainers — but it hopes to ramp up quickly. Launched in June, the New York-based site has already attracted $2.5 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures and is a graduate of Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched incubators.

Sims says his lack of experience as a programmer helped in Codecademy’s creation: “When we would try a new product out, I was the one we would try it out on, so it was almost like having your customer build it.”

Miriam Browning-Nance, a strategic communications student at Columbia University, has been using the service to teach herself basic programming skills.

She moved to New York to pursue a career as an opera singer, but quickly found that even an arts career requires some tech savvy. After starting an opera company, Browning-Nance had a partner show her how to get into the company website’s code to handle basic updates and changes.

She hopes coding skills will boost her resume as she enters an increasingly competitive job market in the communications field.

“I don’t plan to become the next great developer,” she says. “I just want to be able to know a little bit — enough to keep communications platforms up-to-date and add that little extra something that maybe in a job interview they say, ‘Oh, this person has that extra skill.’”

How is Codecademy going to make money off a service that’s currently free? Like many tech startups, it’s focusing on building first, money later.

“We’re not planning to charge for courses,” Sims says. “We’re not really talking much about monetization at the moment.”

Right now, the company’s main struggle is the same problem they’re aiming to fix: Finding developers.

“Hiring is really hard,” Sims says. “Our biggest problem right now is finding incredibly talented developers and designers to work with. That’s sort of why we’re doing this right now – to create more engineers not just for us, but for all the other tech companies out there that are hiring and will be hiring in the future.” 

Out of control document management plagues businesses of every dimension. Duplicate documents, multiple file formats, poor filing practices, buried files, and files spread far and wide in multiple repositories are some of the common problems facing users looking for documents both living and archived. The answer is to index those documents into a central database. But, how do you efficiently index thousands or perhaps millions of documents in such a way as to be both fast and efficient? The simple solution is a search appliance that performs the task for you.

A search appliance is a dedicated computer with a small footprint (1U or 2U) whose only task in life is to provide indexing and searching services to your users or customers. All appliances ship with a web-based interface for easy administration and end-user document search and retrieval. Most search appliance manufacturers provide multiple appliance levels to fit your budget or specific indexing needs. This list of seven enterprise search appliances is in no particular order.

A word of caution is in order when comparing search appliances and their pricing models. Most appliance vendors charge by how many documents you want to index. A few charge by the amount of data you’re indexing, while others have no limit on the number of documents or the data volume.

MaxxCAT

MaxxCAToffers up a true enterprise solution that includes high availability, clustering, database integration and application integration. The highly performing (12,500 queries per minute) MaxxCAT sports a SQL connector to pull data from multiple databases sources. The MaxxCAT EX-5000 series has the capacity to index millions of documents and features a mirrored 1TB storage in a 2U form factor.

MaxxCAT’s Integration Services Group custom builds solutions capable of 250,000 queries per minute and indexing billions of documents.

Google Search Appliance

Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) is the product in this space to which every other search appliance manufacturer compares itself. And, there’s good reasoning behind that comparison: Google knows search. The GSA features Cloud Connect integrated search, People Search, Dynamic Navigation results filtering, Active-Active high availability and Sharepoint 2010 compatibility.

The GSA delivers true universal, enterprise-quality search across your entire organization. The downside to GSA’s awesome power is the price. Prices actually compare pretty well with comparable appliances at the lower end of the number of documents. The price disparity begins when you want to index a million or more documents with GSA.

Thunderstone

Thunderstone is another very well known name in the search appliance business as one of the pioneers of search technology. But, don’t assume that since Thunderstone began operations in 1980 that their technology is old. Their R&D team continues to innovate and pioneer in the business of search. And, with high-profile customers that include QVC, eBay, About.com, Corbis, Associated Press and ZDNet, they have to stay ahead of the competition.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance (TSA)can index information directly from almost any enterprise database system. It also has some unique features such as real-time add or remove URLs, index file servers with no web servers, index flash files and remove duplicate files from search results.

Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance

Though the Mindbreeze site is a bit difficult to decipher because of its native German language content, the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance (FMA) is a major European contender in the enterprise search appliance marketplace. The FMA boasts fast setup and deployment, easy scalability, a centralized interface and a significant price-to-performance ratio.

Fortunately, you don’t have to learn German to use the FMA, since it “speaks” 18 different languages. It’s a product with international appeal in mind. Mindbreeze is also known for its “Zero known Defects” policy, which means that only products that have all known defects corrected will ever see the customer’s site.

Searchdaimon ES

Searchdaimon is another European entry based in Norway. Searchdaimon is the most flexible among all of the search appliance vendors in this list with three enterprise-level options: Search software, A VMware virtual search appliance and a hardware search appliance. One notable feature of their product is that it integrates with your Active Directory (AD) environment so that when users login, they have access only to the files and information granted in AD.

Unlike other search appliance vendors, Searchdaimon prices its products based on the number of users, instead of documents or data volume. If you’re not in Norway or in the EU, you’ll have to figure out the exchange rate from Norwegian Krones into US Dollars or your particular currency.

Perfect Search Appliance

Billed as “The Industry’s most powerful search appliance,” the Perfect Search Appliance (PSA) also boasts 10 times the capacity and twice the query speed of the GSA. The PSA runs your choice of Windows or Linux for the underlying operating system. The PSA has several options including a One Box Extender (OBX) that adds scalability and lower cost extensibility for your existing GSA. Unlike most other search appliances, the PSA’s cost has nothing to do with how many documents you want to index but rather how much total data you have.

The Perfect Search Corporation also offers a White Label Option for those of who want to brand the PSA as their own.

Black Tulip Systems ONEZEEK

The ONEZEEK Document Search Appliance features include easy setup, activity reports, fine-grained controls, collections, on-demand indexing and customizable document types. Black Tulip offers multiple pay-as-you-index plans from very small to any-sized enterprise and two different appliances from which to choose.

The ONEZEEK appliance price includes a predetermined number of indexed documents, one year of customer support, software updates and unit replacement coverage.

Black Tulip also offers an offsite website search service that comes in both free an paid versions. The paid plans depend on the number of pages you want to index and search.

Ken Hess is a freelance writer who writes on a variety of open source topics including Linux, databases, and virtualization. He is also the coauthor of Practical Virtualization Solutions, which was published in October 2009. You may reach him through his web site at http://www.kenhess.com.

As soon as the doors opened at midnight for Black Friday, Best Buy shoppers rushed for doorbuster deals on LCD TVs.

WOODLAND PARK, N.J. (CNNMoney) — Doorbuster deals on LCD televisions drew crowds of Black Friday shoppers to big box stores on Thanksgiving evening.

And for Isabel Baez, the wait outside a Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) in northern New Jersey, started long earlier. At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, to be exact.

“I had my tent, my sleeping bag and a book, and I just got in and held down the reins,” Baez said. “The main thing is to just have fun. Just enjoy yourself, be early, and don’t be stressed if someone is before you in line. You’ll get what you want.”

An hour before Best Buy opened at midnight, just as Black Friday began, the line stretched not only around the entire building, but through the parking lot as well. Nearby, porta-potties were set up for the overnight campers, and police patrolled the area.

The store handed out maps and tickets to the first shoppers in line, who were there mainly for deals on TVs, gaming systems and tablets.

A $199.99 sale for a 42-inch Sharp LCD TV was a popular favorite. Prepared to spend $3,000 that night, Baez planned to buy not one of those, but also a second TV, three tablets and a laptop.

Down the street at Target (TGT, Fortune 500), crowds also gathered long before the store’s midnight opening. The first people in line were hoping to snag a 46-inch Westinghouse LCD TV for $298.

Malls track shoppers’ cell phones on Black Friday

Jeanette Bessinger from Clifton, N.J., didn’t even eat Thanksgiving dinner. Sandwiches would have to do instead. She got to the store around 6 a.m. on Thursday, prepared with a folding chair and two blankets.

“I had a map a month in advance,” said Bessinger, who has shopped on Black Friday for the last eight years. “Make sure you bring food and wherever your stay, make sure there’s a bathroom close.”

While waiting in line, she was also shopping online via her smartphone.

“I already bought a pot and pan set, and a new curling iron,” she said. “Shop while you’re in line. Everything’s free shipping.”

She was planning on buying two TVs in the store, as well as more stocking stuffers.

Independent analysts predict LCD TV prices are at their lowest levels of all time this Black Friday, as television manufacturers try to use bargains to revive struggling sales. And unlike last year, when experts cautioned that the best deals would come after the holiday season, analysts don’t expect prices to fall much further this year.

About a half hour after the Best Buy store opened, Nelson Verges Fuentes was already precariously balancing four TVs on his cart in the check-out line.

“This is a special occasion,” he said. “We’re giving TVs to our nieces and nephews for Christmas.”

Planning to spend about $1,000 that night between himself and his mother-in-law, he said he was disappointed he had to cut back his holiday spending after his employer cut his pay 10% earlier this year.

“Economically, I’m feeling the strain,” he said. “That’s what makes you want to plan ahead and do this.”

An estimated 152 million people are expected to shop over Black Friday weekend, up 10% from last year, according to a recent report from industry trade group the National Retail Federation.  

The German drugmaker Merck KGaA has begun legal action against Facebook after discovering what its lawyer described as the “the apparent takeover of its Facebook page”.

The webpage is being used by the German firm’s US rival Merck & Co.

Merck KGaA said that the social network “is an important marketing device [and] the page is of great value”, adding that since its competitor was benefiting from the move “time is of the essence.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said: “We are looking into it.”

Merck KGaA said it had entered into an agreement with Facebook for the exclusive rights to www.facebook.com/merck in March 2010.

The German firm said a number of its employees had been subsequently assigned administrative rights to the page.

However, Merck KGaA said that when it had checked the site on 11 October this year it had discovered it had lost control of the page, and that content on the site now belonged to Merck & Co.

Divided

The two drugmakers both stem from the same firm set up by a pharmacy owner in the German city of Darmstadt in 1668.

The business was split in two after World War I as part of the reparations package imposed on Germany.

Merck KGaA’s lawyer, Robert Horowitz said he had sent a letter and a series of emails to various Facebook staff asking to discuss what had happened to the webpage.

However, he said the respondents “either did not understand the problem… [or were] intentionally giving unresponsive answers”.

Mr Horowitz said that when he had requested a telephone conversation, one of Facebook’s staff “incredibly replied that ‘no-one is available for a call at this time’”.

Legal steps

Merck KGaA has since filed a petition with the- Supreme Court of the State of New York.

“We took legal action versus Facebook to ask for information why a website we thought we owned isn’t ours anymore,” Dr Gangolf Schrimpf, a spokesman for Merck KGaA, told the BBC.

“We are just trying to learn what happened.”

However, the court filing notes that: “Merck is considering causes of action for breach of conduct, tortious interference with contract, tortious interference with prospective business advantage, and/or conversion.”

Interaction

Merck KGaA stressed that it had not taken any action against its US counterpart at this stage.

Facebook was unwilling to make a comment beyond saying that it was looking into the case.

Branding experts say the case reflects a growing belief that social networks can offer firms a better way of reaching their customers than through their own websites.

“Company communication departments have realised that many of the people they want to reach and influence are already on Facebook,” said Simon Myers, from the consultancy Figtree Network.

“As corporate content becomes more tailored and engaging, social media sites such as Facebook represent a brighter future of greater customer dialogue and interaction than the current corporate website with static content and pictures of people shaking hands.”

Google has announced that it is dropping seven more products in an effort to simplify its range of services.

The out-of-season “spring clean” brings an end to services including Google Wave, Knol and Google Gears.

It is the third time that the US firm has announced a cull of several of its products at the same time after they had failed to take off.

Experts said the strategy might put off users from signing up to new services.

Google announced the move in its official blog.

“We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward,” said Urs Holzle, Google’s vice president of operations.

“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” he added.

Wave goodbye

The seven latest products earmarked for the chop are as follows:

• Google Wave – an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration
• Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends
• Google Friends Connect – allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code
• Google Gears – much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline
• Google Search Timeline – a graph of historical query results
• Knol – a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal – a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power

Google had previously announced its plans to kill off some of the projects on the list.

It has now given details about when the switch-offs will occur. For example Wave will be retired in April, and Knol content will be taken offline in October.

Lessons

The diverse nature of the list illustrated how Google operated as a company, said Richard Edwards, principal analyst at research firm Ovum.

“Any company with the resources and number of brains that Google has will have ideas, only some of which will fly. Hitting the zeitgeist is tricky to plan or predict,” he said.

The steady stream of innovations from the search giant and the open way it announced them had been a welcome change in a tech industry that had traditionally kept its cards close, said Mr Edwards.

But he warned that Google needed to be careful about how it announced new products in future.

“It can hype the bejesus out of new announcements and it can be difficult for people to pick out the substance from the hype,” he said.

There were, he said, “lessons to be learned” from firms such as Apple which took a more measured approach, announcing just a handful of new products once or twice a year.

Focus

Some experts think that Google is streamlining in order to concentrate on its Facebook rival Google+.

The network gained 10 million users within the first 16 days after its private launch, and 40 million within the first 100 days, making it the fastest-growing social network in the history of the web.

But Mr Edwards was sceptical about how successful the service would be in the long-term.

“There is no likelihood of people flocking away from Facebook at the current time unless it commits some hideous faux pas on privacy,” he said.

“Something may displace Facebook but I’m not sure it is likely to be Google+,” he added.

In my last article, I looked at some of the ways in which you can use Vimscript, Vim‘s built-in scripting language, to set up that text editor to do exactly what you want it to. Apparently you liked what you saw and asked for more, so here are some additional tips and tricks to help you get Vim to jump through the hoops of your choice, including techniques for specifying ranges to work on, accepting user input, and debugging.

In the last article, we looked at functions that operate across the whole buffer, and functions that operate on a single line. At times you might want to have a function operate on a range of lines instead. There are two ways you can specify the range of lines over which a function will be applied when you call it. The first is simply to specify the range before the call to the function. This is what you do when using built-in functions like s///:

:1,.s/ping/pong/

This function replaces “ping” with “pong” for every line in the file between line 1 and the line the cursor is currently on. If I wrote a function Capitalize to capitalize the first letter of every word, I could call it with a range in the same way:

:1,.call Capitalize()

What this method actually does is call the function once for every line. Depending on what the function does, the overhead associated with this approach can be fairly high. An alternative is to call the function only once, but deal with the range handling within the function itself. To do this, use the range modifier.

Here is the single-line word count function from the previous article, adapted to apply to a range:

fu! WordsThisLine() range
  let words = 0
  for linenum in range(a:firstline, a:lastline)
    let words += len(split(getline(linenum)))
  endfor
  echo words
  return words
endfu

The range modifier in the first line tells the function to expect a range – though the function will also work fine if called on a single line. The for loop uses two built-in variables, a:firstline and a:lastline, which correspond to the line numbers of the first and last lines of the range. The function loops over each line in the range and adds up the total words, before echoing them and returning them.

You can use this function either by specifying a range on the command line:

:6,9call WordsThisLine()

or by highlighting a range visually and then calling the function with :call WordsThisLine().

It’s also possible to write a function that calculates its own range of lines to operate on from context. You can see how to make that work in this example, which shows a function that lines up assignment operators in program code.

Interacting With the Word Under the Cursor

Another neat trick is to do something with the word currently under the cursor. For example, you could look it up in dict:

fu! Dictionary()
    let dict = "dict"
    let wordUnderCursor = expand("<cword>")
    let command = "!" . dict . " " . wordUnderCursor
    execute command
endfu

expand("<cword>") is a useful Vimscript phrase that gets the word currently under the cursor. The rest of the function just sets up a command to call !dict word; it’s good practice to use variables for the commands you want to run.

You could also look up documentation – for example perldoc – for the word by substituting this line:

let dict = "perldoc -f"

Or you could call a browser. That takes a few more lines to set up properly:

fu! Dictionary()
    let browser = "/path/to/browser"
    let urlFormat = "http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/WORD"
    let wordUnderCursor = expand("")
    let url = substitute(urlFormat, "WORD", wordUnderCursor, "g")
    let command = "!" . browser . " " . url
    execute command
endfu

The most obvious difference here is the need to set up a particular URL format. The substitute command is Vimscript’s way of running s/WORD/wordUnderCursor/g on the string
urlFormat, which gives us the correct URL to pull up in the browser.

A few notes if you want to do this:

1. To minimize debugging, check that the command you’re using works on the command line before you try to set it up in Vim.
2. If the path to the browser contains any spaces, you need to escape them with \\, as in “/path/to/app\\ with\\ space/”.
3. On a Mac, you can simplify the first line by just using let browser = "open", which will automatically call your default browser.

User Input

You might sometimes want user input to a script. For example, perhaps you regularly have to add a label to the start of several text lines, but the label varies. Try this script out:

fu! Label() range
  call inputsave()
  let label = input("Enter label: ")
  call inputrestore()
  for linenum in range(a:firstline, a:lastline)
    let currentline = getline(linenum)
    call setline(linenum, label . " " . currentline)
  endfor
endfu

inputsave and inputrestore first save, then restore, the Vim typeahead buffer; this avoids any possible confusion when getting the user input. The rest of the code uses the range modifier; without it, if you called this function on a range, it would ask you to input the label for each line. getline returns a string with the contents of the given line, and setline sets the contents of the given line; here, with the input label, a space, and the existing line contents.

Debugging

Vimscript has its own integrated debugger, which may come in handy if you’re writing complex functions. To debug a script, call it like this:

:debug call WordsThisLine()

At the first line, Vim will pause, and you’ll see a > symbol. At this point, you can quit altogether (q), continue without stopping until the next breakpoint (c), step through the next line of code (s), execute the next command (n), or finish running the script without breakpoints (f). Note that the difference between step and next is that next skips over function calls, while step goes into the function called.

Try stepping through a function to see the output you get; broadly, if nothing highlighted red shows up, you have no errors. If you do have errors, you’ll get some information about them which should help you to identify the problem.

You can put breakpoints into your code to simplify debugging:

:breakadd func 5 WordsThisBuffer

This adds a breakpoint on line 5 in the given function (note that you don’t use the parentheses at the end of the function name). If you now run :debug call WordsThisBuffer() and hit c, the runthrough will stop before executing line 5.

You can also add a breakpoint in a particular file that Vim sources, with:

:breakadd file 239 myfile.txt

Note that this will only work for a command executed while sourcing that file, but not for a function defined in that file. It’s more useful when debugging your ~/.vimrc (for example when defining maps or shortcuts to call functions) than it is for debugging functions themselves.

Use breakdel func 5 WordsThisBuffer to delete a breakpoint, or :breakdel * to remove all breakpoints.

Using Other Languages

Finally, if you want to do something more complicated, or if you just have a strongly preferred other language, Vim also has interfaces to other scripting languages, including Perl, Python, and Ruby. These languages, obviously, are more powerful than Vimscript, but they also have problems when it comes to using them within Vim. Possibly the biggest one is that for debugging, you’re on your own; Vim will call out once to evaluate your script, rather than being able to step through it line by line if need be. Check out some notes on debugging the Perl interpreter. Along with this goes the fact that there’s very little integration between Vim and the external language, so you’ll need to do a lot of work by hand. You may also have to fix your Vim installation to allow external language interfaces (the Debian default package includes the Perl interpreter by default; you can also check out notes on Ruby, and a list of Vim compile options). Despite these drawbacks, if you have very complex requirements, interfacing with a scripting language is something you can experiment with.

For most purposes, however, Vimscript, tailored as it is to work with Vim, is a great tool. It gives you huge scope for extending Vim to fit your needs.