I’m spending some time trying to learn Vim. I’m finally so fed up with Textmate hogging memory and beachballing (particularly when searching) that i’m just looking for something else. So here are some things i’ve learned.
Learning Vim is like joining an MMO
Like in an MMO, when you start using VIM, everyone is higher level than you, everyone has cooler gear, and knows more about the environment. You have to grind to level and craft gear to make your experience as enjoyable as everyone else’s.
Textmate definitely got a lot of things right
I haven’t fully abandoned Textmate, because i’m such a VIM n00b. Textmate has a lot of handy stuff that it gets right straight out of the box. A lot of the text manipulation shortcuts to do things like justifying assigned values (cmd+opt+]) or modifying multiple columns are intuitive to any mac user. I’m sure that Vim can do all of this stuff too, but at least in the latter case, the behavior for modifying multiple lines at once is a lot clunkier.
Textmate color schemes are also a lot more comprehensible when trying to do any editing. I quite like the Sunburst theme from Textmate, and there are a couple vim clones of the theme here and there, but none of them are quite right by my tastes. Unfortunately there is no previewing mechanism for vim color schemes, so it’s very much a disconnected, alter then refresh process. One would imagine that it’d be possible to hack up a previewer within Vim given that it’s a fully scriptable environment, but i haven’t seen one yet!
What’s so cool about Vim anyway?
Well, the reason i picked Vim, was that memorizing key combos (a la Emacs) has never been a strong suit of mine, especially when the mnemonics are weak. On top of that Vim is multi-environment so if i build up a solid set of tools i can lug them around with me to whatever platform i happen to be working on at the time.
Incidentally, Vim also happens to have scripting bindings for Ruby, Python and Perl, so given the correct installation, you can write your behaviors in any of those languages, which is pretty freakin’ sweet.
Miscellaneous
There will be more posts on Vim!
Anyway, the main reason i wrote this was to get my thoughts down on paper, and also to dump a bunch of links. So here’s a list:
Color Schemes
- (purportedly) The last Vim color scheme you’ll ever need
- Vim Color Schemes
- Herald’s Vim Color Scheme
- DRYing up vim color schemes
- Gigamo’s Sunburst.vim
- sickill’s sunburst.vim
