
VIM Destroys All Other Rails Editors - r11t
http://www.adamlowe.me/2009/12/vim-destroys-all-other-rails-editors.html
======
dylanz
Ugh. Not sure about you, but I think HN should be a IDE/Editor blog post
restricted site.

There was recently a thread on erlang-general that was almost 100 replies
long. It started out as "Is Erlang a Good First Language?"... then slowly
dissolved into "IDE Bashing". I had to switch my mailing list options to
digest I was getting so many emails each day with personal rants.

The thing is, Emacs and Vim are awesome, and they are "huge" programs. Also,
they are "extremely" flexible, so one persons preferences might be way
different than the others. For example, the blog post here uses MacVim and
GVim? That's crazy talk (IMHO).

RTFM!

~~~
blasdel
That's horrible! No one should ever have to use digest mode, especially since
it makes the list even worse for everyone else. Maybe you should get a better
email client? I know some people that use Gmail as a mailing list client
independently from their normal mail.

~~~
jamesbritt
"Maybe you should get a better email client? "

I hear Emacs is an E-mail client ...

~~~
jrockway
And it manages mailing lists quite well.

------
stanley
Poor article in the sense that it does little more than list out the plugins,
rather than providing some commentary on how each plugin improves
productivity.

~~~
samdk
I was disappointed as well.

I do recommend the articles listed on the Rails wiki's 'Text Editors' page for
Vim, though: <http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/text-editors>

(Listed here in case that page is changed:
<http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/10/10/coming-home-to-vim>,
<http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/17/vim-follow-up>,
[http://biodegradablegeek.com/2007/12/using-vim-as-a-
complete...](http://biodegradablegeek.com/2007/12/using-vim-as-a-complete-
ruby-on-rails-ide/))

------
Semiapies
The headline is cheerful, ironic attention-grabbing; the writer acknowledges
text editor choice is a preference, then lays out briefly how to set up vim
for RoR development.

~~~
mailanay
No offence, but this comment sounds more like a one generated by a bot of some
kind.

~~~
J_McQuade
I'd love to see the code for such a bot! Well, me and a thousand NLP
researchers, I'm sure.

[edit] NLP being Natural Language Processing, rather than Neuro-Linguistic
Programming ;)

------
rufugee
The thing that always gets me when trying to use either vim and emacs for IDE-
like programming (and don't get me wrong...I have used vim for regular editing
for years), is that someone says, "yeah, (vim|emacs) destroys all other
editors and IDEs. You just need to install this list of 400 plugins, write
some elisp to configure it, learn each of these 200 keystrokes, understand
where the plugins overlap and contradict, and you're golden".

Versus, download Eclipse/Netbeans, open, and start coding.

I _want_ to use vim as an IDE...I just don't have the time.

~~~
Semiapies
When I tried Eclipse, I found it as foreign as emacs, just GUIer. IDEs and
editors require learning and configuration once you get much past notepad or
pico.

------
10ren
I too use tabstop=2

But `cat` uglifies it, so I added this to ~/.bashrc:

    
    
        alias tab='sed "s/\t/  /g" '
    

You needn't say "cat myfile | tab"; you can just use it exactly like cat: "tab
myfile" (I'm not saying that _you'd_ not instantly realize that - but that I
didn't).

~~~
blasdel
You needn't ever say "cat myfile | ..." _period!_

The shell has stdin redirection built in via '<'

~~~
jrockway
Unless you want to read your pipeline from left to right, like everything else
you read.

~~~
blasdel
What if you want the subject on the right, like all non-pipeline commands you
read?

    
    
      foo myfile
      bar < myfile
      (bar | baz) < myfile

------
adam_lowe
The main reason for the post was that at Hashrocket we benefit from real-time
streaming Vim plugins courtesy of Tim Pope and wanted to share how awesome it
can be as a Rails editor. I plan to follow up with more on the individual
plugins themselves. It would've been a small novel to try and cover each of
the plugins themselves in any detail. Most have a solid README on the project
page for starters.

------
gruntruk
I thought the article was worth while if only for pointing me at various
plugins I wasn't aware of. If you're a vim hardcore then this is probably
nothing new... but for others who are not it seemed useful. I agree that
having some more info on why these plugins are useful would be nice, but
following the links was easy enough to see if the plugin was interesting.

------
timmorgan
I expected to see a bit more of how to use all those plugins. But I suppose a
list of them is better than nothing.

------
graywh
\+ for mentioning all tpope's plugins/bundles.

\- for some poor suggestions.

~~~
gry
Pray tell, what are your suggestions and criticisms? A friend of mine after a
horrible computer bitswap, bit into vim after TextMate. I wanted to follow,
just to learn. This is actually fantastic for me -- there are various .
configs I knew nothing of, but now can grep/google for info.

Please advise.

~~~
graywh
He had some things incorrect that have been mostly fixed now. Don't worry too
much about it.

FYI, I suggest leaving tabstop=8 if you indent with spaces like a good boy.

~~~
adam_lowe
Thanks for the good feedback to the post. I responded to the latest feedback
from you and discussed with the Pope.

------
bprater
Cream is a good VIM editor on Windows.

~~~
Dobbs
I never seemed to understand cream.

The idea is to take vim and basically castrate it by getting rid of the
standard keybindings and ways of doing things to make it 'easier' for non-vim
users. It even appears they got rid of modal-editing.

The issue with this then they don't learn how to do things the vim way which
defeats the purpose of using vim, just go use notepad++ or any other gui
editor you get the same experience.

~~~
bmj
Agreed. You can go into "expert" mode and use it with the normal vim bindings,
though. Used in this manner, it does provide a bit of a better introduction to
vim, as you learn the various modes and keybindings, but still get a
reasonable UI for configuration and whatnot.

------
brianherman
VIM DESTROYS ALL EDITORS PERIOD

