NOTE: This post is not about the editor war — so please don’t try to start one either.
I use vim as my editor of choice. As I note above, to each his own editor.
However, Vim is not what one would call a “sexy editor”. After all, it has been around (in some shape or form) since before I was born. It does not generate as much buzz in the blogosphere and is not the darling of all the new kids on the block, as some of the other editors out there. Not many Ruby on Rails developers, for instance, seem to be using Vim for coding (actually, saying that a lot of RoR developers seem to be using Textmate is probably more accurate, but you get the point). It is written in C and does not use git for hosting. The Vim website leaves much to be desired. In the social networking world, Vim barely has a presence.
But, I contend that Vim still has a lot to offer. Here are few of the things you can check out to spruce up your Vim usage:
- xoria256: a modern, functional and eye-pleasing color scheme.
- snipMate: Textmate like snippets for Vim. Interestingly, snipmate lives on github. There are actually several textmate like plugins for Vim, I prefer snipMate. I have succesfully used snippetsEmu in the past.
- Omni completion: Probably not as awesome as Visual Studio’s, but useful nonetheless.
- Check out my list of some essential vim plugins.
- A byte of Vim: from the author of the well known “A byte of Python” book.
I’m also very happy to see the number of Vim related repositories on github. Bottomline: don’t give up on Vim. Vim is still sexy baby, you just need to look in the right places :)
Update: I’m including a screenshot of Xoria below.
23 Comments
Just tried xoria256, liking it so far. Nice find!
Any reason to chose snipmate over snippetsemu?
Not particularly — both of them have very similar features. snipmate has a better syntax for specifying snippets IMHO, and more flexible in how users can specify custom snippets. I think snipmate syntax is also closer to textmate’s, so porting bundles should be easier.
I tell people editing with VIM feels like painting on a canvas — like I can shape it in any direction or dimension I want. The “Visual mode” has a lot to do with that. (Although with “Undo,” perhaps sculpting clay is a better analogy.)
I tell people editing with VIM feels like painting on a canvas — like I can shape text in any direction or dimension I want. The “Visual mode” has a lot to do with that. (Although with “Undo,” perhaps sculpting clay is a better analogy.)
That sounds very “zen”
I recently found the ‘rope’ project: refactoring for python, which supports vim. Really neat.
URL: rope
I still prefer twilight.vim theme:) Can’t separate from it no matter what.
The first thing I did when I read your arcticle was try to find a screenshot of xoria256. It’s quite unfortunate you didn’t post a screenshot. My satisfaction and likelihood of following your posts would have increased.
There are several screenshots on the xoria page. I’ll embed one in the post directly. Here is one of the screenshots:
The first thing I did when I read your article was try to find a screenshot of xoria256. It’s quite unfortunate you didn’t post a screenshot. My satisfaction and likelihood of following your posts would have increased.
NERDTree!
I still prefer desert256 for editing, but xoria256 has the best vimdiff scheme I’ve encountered.
Actually, quite a few Rails devs have switched. I moved from Textmate to VIM (MacVim…) several months ago and have been quite happy with it.
What font are you using in that screenshot? Might also consider sharing your .vimrc if you have any special tricks in there. On dotfiles.org, .vimrc files are quite popular.
It looks like Deja Vu Sans Mono or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (I originally thought Consolas but it’s not tall enough)
I got the screenshot from the xoria256 page on vim.org, so I’m not sure what font is being used. I personally use Inconsolata.
NERDtree, folding and syntax highlighting.
I love vim.
Vim is and always will be sexy until some other editor can prove useful and powerful enough with its keybindings. How many editors out there allow you to have both hands on the home row of your keyboard all day long (an editor that doesn’t come with every feature of your operating system implemented in lisp)?
Haha, well said Oliver!
this is my hand-rolled .vimrc which has syntax highlighting, folding and more and I set up exuberant ctags some while ago.
vim is uber-sexy. I’m just looking for some decent IDE stuff and I’m set (not checked out minibuf yet).
my criteria is I’m a touch typist and any plugins or scripts *have* to be keyboard easy.
also I remap my keyboard using xmodmap to sway Caps Lock and Escape (regedit if you want to do this in windows).
as promised.
1 ” Steve’s .vimrc
2 ” 25th March 2009
3
4 ” this has to be the first command as it affects everything else
5 set nocompatible
6
7 ” this allows backspace to work as expected when in insert mode
8 set backspace=indent,eol,start
9 set wrap! ” turns of word wrapping
10
11 ” some prettyfying of looks
12
13 syntax on “syntax highlighting
14 set showmode
15 set showcmd ” show incomplete commands
16 set ruler ” show cursor all the time
17
18 ” some search configuration
19
20 set hlsearch “highlight search matches
21 set incsearch ” enable incremental searches
22 set ignorecase ” make searches case insensitive
23 set smartcase ” except when all caps
24
25 ” The following settings control tabs and indentation
26
27 set autoindent
28 filetype plugin indent on ” load indent files to do language dependent indenting
29 set ts=4 ” set tabstop
30 set shiftwidth=4 ” indent width for autoindent
31 filetype indent on ” indent depends on filetype
32
33 ” this is folding ** have to look this up to use correctly but it is cool
34
35 set foldenable ” turn it on
36 set fdm=indent ” make it fold indents
37 “following line apparently allows space to toggle folds (coolio and if you
38 “find it here it does
39 nnoremap za
40
41 ” miscellaneous settings that I can’t fit elsewhere
42 “Informative status line
43 set statusline=%F%m%r%h%w\ [TYPE=%Y\ %{&ff}]\ [%l/%L\ (%p%%)]
44 set number
45 colorscheme elflord
hey Tom Rope links broken.. can yo edit your comment ?
There are several screenshots on the xoria page. I’ll embed one in the post directly. Here is one of the screenshots:
Hi Diwaker Gupta.
I am Vim user.. I used it every single day, and I love it.
Recently I post short blog post about tricks on Vim.
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