Trying out Vim

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.


  1. I’ve noticed that the more I use it the more I like it so maybe it’s just a matter of time before I take the plunge and switch over to it fully. 

  2. Vim is like a blank canvas when you start. Literally. Not even the syntax highlighting is on by default. 

  3. Jeffrey Way’s, Vincent Driessen’s and Steve Losh’s tips, tricks and config files where extremely helpful. 

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