Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict – Joy of the Vim Text Editor « /usr

Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict – Joy of the Vim Text Editor « /usr
slashusr.wordpress.com

I'm trying to use Sublime Text these days (won't ever have Slime to develop Clojure, though).

:e filename

I admit, the main reason for me to develop in Vim these days is to simply minimize the number of keystrokes I have to press (and the number of times I have to reach for the mouse), because, due to RSI, I experience a mild, but constant, and noticeable discomfort in my wrists (...and triceps, and shoulder) whenever I type (I distinctly remember I developed it in Eclipse during my Symbian C++ development internship). I honestly tried Emacs a few times because of superior Lisp editing, but it just didn't stick, I just can't bring myself to press more keys than I use to in Vim. Force of habit? Maybe.

I have never expected to be "hooked up" on Vim, but I was. In my first job out of the university I was writing Linux-based embedded software almost exclusively. I could never get used to Linux GUI editors after Visual Studio: the lack of any built-in IDE features and constant switching from the editor to the shell made me switch away to something closer to the shell. The initial discomfort of modal editing was less annoying than the lack of features and the accessibility of shell in Linux GUI editors (Eclipse CDT was a pain to set up and use back in these days). Then the discovery of split windows, regex replacement, folds, macros, ex-mode commands, and extensions made my experience what I then thought tolerable.

The mechanical memory had set in, and, upon moving on to my next job, I discovered that I could no longer use Visual Studio with as much comfort as I used Vim! It was curious, since I've "grown up" as a programmer with Visual Studio in the 4 years at the university.

It has snowballed further since then: remapping ';' to ':', ZQ and ZZ shortcuts, quickfix window, copy-paste registers, more motions with text objects ("delete between {}", "move to next ','", replace "()" with "[]", indent 4 line with "4>>"), sorting selected lines, coming up simple with ad-hoc refactoring functions and macros on the fly, marks, buffer greps, jumping between files with LustyExplorer an NERDTree, plugins (VimScript must die, but while it's there, it does the job), and falling back to the shell where Vim falls short. A few vimgolf (there is a site for this) challenges also added some tricks into my toolbox.

Right now I use Vim whenever I can. It does show its age, especially in areas like REPL, IDE features and code completion (it'll get there, eventually, I hope), but I just don't feel at home using anything else at the moment. I'm always on the lookout on the future of Vim or its next successor.

PS: Disclaimer: I don't necessarily advocate for everyone to learn Vim, it really requires a non-trivial investment of time to establish the necessary mechanical memory, but it was worth it for me personally (I do C, C++ and Python almost exclusively). Depending on your domain and the technology you use, you may be better off using Emacs (Lisp) or VS with Resharper (C#).

Getting out of insert mode with a double j instead of moving your hand (esc) or doing the slightly awkward ctrl+[ is a godsend.