There’s no doubt that if you’ve ever spent some time looking through and reading various developer related things that you’ve seen people mentioning the text editor Vim. I decided to try it out the graphical version of it, gVim, and it really is a different experience. Instead of relying on trusty old keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+S you instead have to first hit Esc and type :w. While I’m not a hundred percent sold on it¹ I can defintively see the appeal, especially for people who love their keyboards. The Vim version of the color scheme Solarized, which I absolutely love, looks gorgeous and what I can tell Vim probably has the best Markdown syntax highlighting I’ve ever seen. One other aspect I really like is that you can save all of your settings in a single file which you can then use across multiple systems, since Vim is cross-platform.

I’m still very new to using it, so if I decided to really dive in to it I’m sure I’ll write more about it during the coming weeks.

My (g)Vim config

I naturally wanted to add some settings to make the experience slightly better² and thanks to a lot of different people³ across the web I was able to change quite a whole lot to my liking. I also installed a plugin called NERDTree which adds a sidebar where you can see the files in your project directory. Pathogen is also very helpful when it comes to managing all your plugins. It’s of course available on my GitHub page and it’s loaded with comments.

Resources

If you’re interested in trying Vim out, I encourage you to look at these websites and screencasts.

• Use Vim
• Vim Recipes
• Vimcasts
• Derek Wyatt’s Vim tutorial videos