A good friend of mine posted an article that finally inspired me to learn another editor (even though I was, and still am, quite happy with TextMate).
What resulted was a direct vertical climb up the the learning curve of VIM:
And, painful it was! There were times when I felt obligated to keep using it, even though I longed for the simpicity of TextEdit or TextMate. Why did I do it? Well, when I learned how to chain commands together I was addicted! And then there was finding out that VIM does all the things I’ve wanted an editor to do for a long time.
A few of the features I love:
- Ability to chain commands together (d3w, di”, c/Word
, g~e etc) - Visual block mode
- VIM plugins
- Complete from words in doc
- Lots of navigation keys to get you precisely where you want to be in less than 3 key strokes
- VIM follows me everywhere – Desktop, terminal, linux, unix, windows, OS X)
- Multiple registers (clipboards)
- Macros
- The ”.” key (repeat last edit)
- Many more
I now really fancy this old-timer VIM, and as my friend described, I can shovel around text by the shovel-full. It’s an amazing feeling! I still feel all warm inside and excited when I go to edit a bunch of text and get to hop around, move stuff around, make spelling corrections, all without moving my hands off the middle of the keyboard!
2 comments:
Great, so are you going to use vim as your permanent Ruby editor? I've been a sometime user for a while, and have been thinking of jumping the whole way in too.
I use it now for everything but serious ruby development. I'm still much faster in TextMate and I just get lost in VIM sometimes when editing a lot of files.
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