Almost 20 years after, I think learning vim was one of the best investments of time. vimrc, then started using the Janus distribution, and finally settled for just a few selected plugins installed with Pathogen. I started piling up customizations in my. And that’s how I started using vim every day. vim (2002–now)Īs I said, one of the reasons I bought my iBook G3 in 2002 was to learn the Unix command line. It had pretty good integration with MacOS, and it used the same shortcuts and plugins as the standard vim, so it was perfect in every way. I used MacVim for a few years on the Mac, as my default GUI text editor. The success of Ruby on Rails propulsed TextMate to the top however, the lack of progress towards TextMate 2.0 made me look elsewhere. We can still watch this demo in what is now one of the oldest videos in YouTube. TextMate was the editor that David Heinemeier Hansson used to demo Ruby on Rails. The first one that actually worked for me was Smultron, a rather obscure text editor from Sweden, by far not the most popular in the platform, but extremely good at what it did. I bought an iBook G3 in December 2002 to learn Unix and Objective-C but for a couple of months I struggled to find a text editor as good as EditPlus. I’m glad it is still around after all these years, though. As I stopped working on Windows, I stopped using it. I used it to write all of my HTML, CSS, Active Server Pages, VBScript code, and more with it. Small, incredibly fast, with plenty of syntax files contributed by users. I loved EditPlus since the first day I opened it, and it was my personal companion at writing code for years. If you like this, I’ve written more about the subject in one of my books ( EPUB and HTML version). This is only about small, fast, flexible tools that have helped me write prose and code throughout the years. I’m not mentioning the various IDEs that I had to use in the same points in time, because they are really specific to a particular technology: Visual Studio for C#, Xcode for Objective-C and Swift, etc. This article is a summary of that history, so far. Being able to make very precise and complex changes with only a few keystrokes, where previously the task would require various combinations of mouse selection and typing, has been eye-opening and time-saving.There has been a particular text editor that defined each period of my career as a software developer. It’s truly amazing what can be done with vi and MacVim, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface. Set font to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 12px.Map jj to Escape (because the Escape key is so far away for such a common function). My current development environment is now built as follows: The Janus distribution of plugins and configurations turned vim into a powerful integrated development environment, and eased my transition from TextMate. Vim Text Objects: The Definitive Guide was one of the later guides I followed, but helped the most in providing me with the “a ha!” moment where all the puzzle pieces fell into place and finally stayed stuck in my brain. Some of the critical guides and tools that helped me get started include: As expected, the learning curve was substantial, but I found many helpful pointers along the way, and I have a long way yet to go. Most importantly, I’m “sold” on the power of vi, and have no regrets about my switch. Now that I’ve been using MacVim as my editor exclusively for nine months, I’ve been reflecting on the journey. But I’d also always had a strong preference for using the keyboard for as much as possible, foregoing the mouse (or more recently, the trackpad) whenever possible, and ultimately this was what drew me to finally tackle vi rather than move to Coda, Sublime Text, or other traditional editors. When I made an error, I’d quit without saving, and try again. Over the years, I only accumulated enough vi knowledge to make the simplest edits to unix configuration files, and save my work. I knew that hardcore vi users swore by it, but I also knew that it had a steep learning curve, due the drastically different method of editing it employed. Moving to MacVim was a major decision for me, as I’d never been a vi user before, and the key thing I’d learned through 24 years of “near misses” with vi was that it was a different breed of editor than anything else out there. It’s also noteworthy that while I’d been a TextMate fan for five years or so, for the 19 years prior I coded almost exclusively in Emacs. As many developers began migrating to other, more powerful editors, I resisted for a while, but ultimately made the decision early this year to leave TextMate behind and move to MacVim. Unfortunately, this great editor did have some shortcomings, and improvements were few and far between, with an uncertain future. It seemed everyone who was anyone was using TextMate, especially if they were living in the Ruby on Rails world. TextMate was my trusty Mac code editor for many years.
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