I'd Tap That

The Ruby world and many others have a tap() method on a class way up in the hierarchy near God that lets the bug hunting developer peek inside of objects during execution to see what the gnomes are getting up to under the covers. I needed just such a tool for my latest dabblings in Vim, so I built one and thought I’d share it here:

function! Tap(thing) echom string(a:thing) return a:thing endfunction

It’s not very intimidating, I know, but thats a little gem of a function. I used it to debug the setting of the includeexpr option in Vim, as shown here:

set includeexpr=Tap(substitute(Tap(v:fname),'\\${\\?\\(\\w\\+\\)}\\?','\\=expand(\"$\".submatch(1))','g'))

I was suspicious that the v:fname variable was not being set properly before includeexpr was being evaluated by Vim. Tap() proved that to be the case which allowed me to focus my debug efforts on the real cause, instead of continuing to waste time fretting over the search and replace patterns in the substitute and whether I’d escaped them correctly or not. I only wish the Tap() inspiration had come to me sooner than it really did. Oh well… with Tap() as a permanent fixture in my ~/.vimrc, hopefully it won’t take me as long to think of it the next time I need its services.