Vim

My Life in Vim

I love Vim! I code in Vim. I think in Vim. I dream in Vim! Vim is a great editor - powerful, intuitive (at least with :source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim), customisable, lightweight, with many plugins and extensions. It's the cross-platform programmers' power-editor, and works very well.

Here are some resources I prepared on Vim: Tips and Tricks session on OSDClub Tel Aviv (www.shlomifish.org/lec..., my Vim configuration (www.shlomifish.org/ope..., a lecture introducing Vim for beginners (www.shlomifish.org/lec.... Etc.

The Emacs vs. vi war is irrelevant now. Now it's Vim vs. Emacs (vs. other editors). Vim is many steps ahead of traditional vi, and transcended above it. It's the Emacs of vi clones, without all the annoyance that is Emacs.

vim is all you need
...well, all I need anyway. I love it mostly because of how quickly it lets you edit files with keystrokes. I use it no matter what platform i'm on, freebsd, linux, and win32 gvim beats any windows editor i've ever seen (even for programming, i'd rather use it than any ide). I especially love the 'torte' color scheme ;) I'll continue to use it for, probably, ever.

How I became hooked on vi(m)
I was interested in other editors since the one I used back then was too restricted.
Additionally, vi* can be found on most any UN*X. However, most tutorials
for vi just cover things like h,j,k,l,a, and that's it.

Then I stumbled across an excellent article
-- actually a series of articles -- highlighting advanced
features of vi*, and never ever bothering wih h,j,k,l & co; instead
starting directly with

:g/^/m0,

:%s/^\([^ ]* [0-9]\)[0-9]*\([0-9] \)/\1\2,

:%s/Line \([0-9][0-9]*\): \(.*\)/\1s;$; XXX \2,

and "poor Hal, a corporate maintenance
programmer", who's boss tries to weasle out of explaining a bad crash by overloading Hal with editing (faking) of logfiles & co.

Needless to say, I was hooked -- straight info towards and a hint of the
real power of vi*. If you need to see a glimpse of the power before you're
willing to climb that learning curve, go right
there.

Vim6, editor of champions.
Folding, syntax highlighting, more configurable than a very configurable thing, a decent GUI, and in Windows a nice installer - it even intergrates itself into Explorer's context menu (if you ask it to). In easy mode, even a notepad loonie could use it.

And, of course, if you're prepared to get used to it and learn how to use what's probably the most important application you'll ever use, you'll find vim will scale as far as you like.

Don't trust your first experience with it or another vi derivative - once you've got past the first hurdle you'll never look back.

And you won't have to, since it's supported on just about every platform in existance :)

VIM is my shepherd. I shall not font.
I actually had the opportunity to meet RMS when he stayed at the CoffeeNet (www.coffeenet.com) for a few weeks. I was using one of the machines in the cafe (which runs linux exclusively), and had vim going with multiple buffers, command-line completion, and syntax coloring. He looked over my shoulder intently for a few moments, certain that I was using some bizarre form of emacs, and then noticed the absence of the wasted top-line of "Buffers Files etc...". He shuddered out loud and walked back to his filthy toshiba laptop to continue hacking.