The tech blog of Peter Shangov

So I finally decided to give Git a go. I work on Windows XP. Git’s homepage lists msysgit as the installer for non-Cygwin Win32 users, so I went on and grabbed it. The installation, however, proved far less straightforward than I expected.

First, msysgit presented me with the following screen:

Vim being one of the most commonly used programming editors by the nerds that perl programmers are, it has quite a few scripts allowing you to read module documentation straight from within Vim itself. All of them, however, just grab the output of the ‘perldoc’ command and place it in a plain text buffer. PERLDOC2 does a similar job, but with a twist - it adds syntax coloring to make reading documentation easier and more convenient.

Perl is notorious for its punctuation-ridden syntax, and if there is one place where this is manifested most obviously, it is when working with data structures. While I myself can see the beauty behind the line noise and have nothing against the syntax per se, it sometimes feels there are just too many characters to type. In particular, I have recently had to do a lot of work with XML data represented by perl hashes, via XML::TreePP and XML::Compile. Working with the data structures generated by these modules can quickly become pretty painful.