
Two weeks with Vim - iuguy
http://soledadpenades.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-vim/
======
jhrobert
I am a wordstar guy, I started with CP/M...

For years I enjoyed Borland products, they used Wordstar key bindings.

And then one day it stopped working. I simply had to use the mouse.

I was shocked.

It took me years to recover. I hated it.

Call me a masochist, a few years ago I tried Emacs, it was the only editor
with syntax enlighting for Ruby at the time.

Except it was not working, or at least it was not working for me.

I had learned a little bit of lisp however, so it was not a total waste of
time.

A few ago I was so frustrated with my editor (Notepad++), that I decided to
give Vim a try.

Well... I am french. I can tell you that using Vim with a french keyboard is
hell. That, plus copy/paste with the mouse working erratically (that is: more
or less depending on the current "mode")... I quickly got frustrated again.

And then, boom, my netbook's hard drive goes back to his creator and I am
forced to switch to my Linux netbook. No more Notepad++ there. I am back with
SciTe.

Now my friends, may be you will understand it better when I will tell you a
little secret I am sligthly ashamed of:

    
    
      My project is mainly ONE big file, almost 12 000 lines of code, even the CSS that I used in in it.
    

No more buffers, no more windows, no more subdirectory to navigate.

Just one big file.

Heaven.

I wish I had seen the ligth before.

All I miss is a little post processor tool, with which I could define
"sections" in my big file. Sections that it will dispatch into their own
little files.

And when I will move to git, I will write it, and I will make it
"bidirectortional", so that I can fetch back changed files, fetch them back
into my BIG file that is.

One big file. Simplicity.

Don't worry, be happy.

~~~
jamesbritt
A few years ago I was chatting with some fellow geeks, and, as often happens,
we got on to ridiculing PHP developers.

Ha ha! Every PHP app is one big file! What losers. Yeah, we were having blast
with these digs. But then I realized that, at least in some ways, this was an
epic win. Have to go dig into some alien app? No worries; everything you need
(or probably care about) is in the one big file. Need to deploy? FTP that one
big file.

Seriously, maybe it's not as crazy as it seems.

The better approach might be for your editor to behave _as if_ all code were
one big file, when needed, and behave _as if_ all code were nicely split out,
when needed.

And have multiple files makes life easier when you're on a team and several
people are touching different parts of an app.

But before rejecting something like this out of hand, consider what your needs
really are, and if how you're doing things is really what's going to work best
for you.

~~~
jhrobert
I am in the process of implementing my proposal (JavaScript & nodejs). It will
take a couple of days I guess. I'll keep the HN community posted.

We'll see who's crazy!!! :)

------
jjcm
The man throws out an excellent plug in the article: vimcasts
(<http://vimcasts.org>). Drew Neil (the man who creates/narrates them) does an
excellent job of explaining not only the basics of vim, but also the
intricacies of it as well. I consider myself a fairly seasoned vim user, but
even I picked up a few tricks from his vimcasts. Try them out.

------
Supermighty
I love VIM. It's my go to editor for everything. And as much as I love it I
hate to admit that I was more productive using Eclipse when it came to a
large-ish web project.

I tried using gVIM tabs, an buffers, and minibufexplorer, and Project, and
ctags. Either I was doing it wrong or they just didn't want to work how I
thought and worked.

So I'll lust after VIM and use it when I can, but I'll default to Eclipse when
it comes time to work with a project set.

~~~
kertap
I've been doing some ruby and php stuff at home and I mostly use vim. But when
I go back into work it's back to java and eclipse.

I would love to use vim on my java work but I'd really miss eclipses
background compilation and server integration.

~~~
azim
Try Eclim for your java work. It's a set of vim plugins which run and
communicate with a headless Eclipse instance in the background. This allows
you use Vim as your editor and pull many of Eclipse's fancy features forward.

------
apinstein
I just got TM-style command-T working on my vim setup thanks to wincent, it is
a nice implementation: <http://wincent.com/products/command-t>

It was really one of the only things about TM that made me jealous :)

Also it taught me about <Leader> which I'd never even heard of before! Great
way to keep your personal commands namespaced from stock vim.

~~~
moe
For anyone interested I'd suggest to also look at FuzzyFinder. It does the
same thing but is a little more advanced (real fuzzy search, also works on
buffers, etc.):

<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984>

------
scorpion032
I use vim, but not vim exclusively. Every single day, I use gedit, scite,
scribes and an IDE - some times in the vi mode.

There is a cognitive load to switching between many editors. That is something
Emacs users who always exist in Emacs do away with.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
And vim users who only use vim don't?

------
crazydiamond
To the author (and this has been posted to HN before but deserves a reposting
for those who missed it):

<http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/>

------
olalonde
> I was more of an Emacs person

Are there really any benefit of switching from Emacs to Vim? I was under the
impression that both editors were pretty much interchangeable.

~~~
weaksauce
vim is more of a text editor that emphasizes a minimum of keystrokes to do
things efficiently. Emacs is a text editor that is leans more to the IDE side
of the spectrum with many cool extensions that make your life easier.(I am not
saying vim doesn't have extensions just that emacs seems to use them more or
has more of an emphasis to them) Both are excellent text editors. one will fit
your style of living. use that one.

~~~
FraaJad
Someone said on Stack overflow, "I use Vim for manipulating text, Emacs to do
programming and Firefox to look at funny cat pictures". I agree with that
assessment.

------
sero
Wow, I would love a personal Drew Neil (from VimCasts) to read me bedtime
stories.

(Also, great site, I'm learning!)

