Editing a .jar with `vim`
However after selecting a file (eg. AbstractComponent.class) and press Enter, within vim I get:
caution: filename not matched
This is probably a known bug in vim's ZIP plugin - the plugin does not properly handle ZIP files that contain ZIP comments. See e.g. this mailing list post
As a side note, I also noticed that if I extract the jar (either with unzip or jar) and open an extracted file with vim, the contents are misformatted
This is because most files inside a JAR are compiled Java class files (file suffix .class
). These are binary data, and vim is not really suitable for editing them, because vim is a text editor, not a binary editor.
You can edit them in vim using the xxd
command (see "Using xxd" in the vim docs), or you can use a hex editor, such as bvi.
At any rate, directly viewing the contents of a class file is rarely helpful, as you need to understand the binary class file format to read them.
Could you explain why you are trying to open files inside a JAR? Then maybe we can help.