Vim, revisited

A few months ago (just over 3 in fact) I posted about having begun to learn vi¹. Since then, I've learned a lot about it, discovered several plugins, and many times attempt to hit Esc after typing into Firefox. Or use hjkl to navigate in a text area. The only other program I now use to edit text is OpenOffice, mainly because it's a little difficult to get fancy charts and things into Vim. Also I submitted a paper in monospaced font with no formatting, the prof might be a little annoyed. You might think it overkill to use Vim for something simple like jotting down notes, but the funny thing is that Vim starts a fair bit faster than any other graphical text editor on my machine, like GEdit or Kate.

I've replaced my IDEs with it. I used to use Quanta, but it is slow to boot, and is once in a while unstable. Once in a while it will crash when I use the built-in FTP. And when I mean crash, it not only crashes Quanta, but the entire X server goes down. Slightly annoying.

Your productivity is improved by a fair bit when you start using this. Due to the mode-based editing, it is much easier to type commands than using Ctrl/Shift/Alt/some-combination-of-the-three, especially when you want more complex things. Want to delete a line? Press dd. Swap two characters? xp. One I use a lot is Ctrl+6 (or Ctrl+^ without pressing Shift), which opens the last file you had open. Kinda like how in Half-life you press q to get to the last weapon. On that note, I wonder how games would play if you could differentiate between q and Q... I guess you wouldn't be able to use Shift for sprint anymore.

You can even record a set of keystrokes, and bind that set of keystrokes to a key: press q, then the key, call it k. Every key you type will be recorded. Then press q to stop recording. Then later on when you want to use that recording, press @ then k. My only problem with this is that @ is a little awkward to do over and over, but there is probably a rebinding of keys.

It doesn't just end with the keyboard shortcuts. There are plenty of plugins for Vim. I have three favourites:
- VTreeExplore - it is a window in Vim (btw in Vim you can split windows, just like most fancy editors) that shows a directory tree. Very handy. Others have written about it too.
- Surround - when typing contexts (like dw or d$, which are delete word and delete from-cursor-to-end-of-line, respectively) you now can use s, which affects the surroundings around a bit of text. Type ds( to delete the parentheses around something. Type cs{[ to switch the curly brackets to square brackets.
- Vim's Rails plugin - This does more than just syntax highlighting. It adds some very helpful things for file navigation (something that is a fair bit annoying in Vim). If your cursor is over a model or controller name, you can press gf to go to that file. If you're in a view or model, press :Rcontroller (this uses tab auto-completion too, so just type :Rcont and hit tab) to jump to the controller. Similarily for jumping to models. If you're in a controller action, you can jump to the view. It's all pretty handy, and there are probably plenty of shortcuts that I don't know about. You can read here to learn more about Vim+Rails.
Note: I know at least one person is going to mention Textmate. Two things: I don't use a Mac (nor do I intend to any time soon), and I don't like to pay for software.

So it's been over 3 months and I'm not turning back. In fact, this was pretty much the case after a few weeks, and I am continually learning more. I recommend it to any programmer. You can also try Emacs too, I think it does the same kind of stuff and it is mostly a matter of preference - kinda like Ruby vs. Python ;).

¹ Technically, it's GVim, which is the graphical version of Vim, which is an open-source remake of an older text editor called vi, but these are just details.