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.
Vim and the future of editors
As is evident from the image below, something about my last post clearly struck a chord with a lot of people.
Traffic spike
I don’t know if it was “vim” or it was “sexy”, but somehow this post landed up on Reddit. This is the closest I’ve come to being slashdotted — for that one day, Reddit drove nearly 95% of the traffic to my site. Also, before you start jumping to conclusions from the graph above, let me put some numbers out there. On average, my site gets anywhere between 200 to 400 visitors daily. On April 18th, my site got 7000+ visitors, an order of magnitude more than I normally get. That is the spike you see, and now the traffic is back to normal, thank you very much.
Since a lot of people seem to be interested in Vim hopefully, I want to discuss the space of text editors (in particular, editors for programming) and where I think we are headed.
The first observation is that both of the giants on the editing world — Vim and Emacs — are ancient by any standards. Depending o how you look at it, I think it is fair to say that neither editor has evolved significantly in terms of the underlying code, architecture and usage model in the past two decades, if not more.
The second observation is that despite the large number of editors out there, IMHO few have any significant mind and market share other than Vim and Emacs. Obviously there is Eclipse, Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.
And so I wonder, what would the text editor landscape look 5-10 years down the line? There are many who would say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I’m a big believer in change, and I think over time, change is inevitable. However, at this point I don’t know what, if any, substantial change is happening in the text-editor arena. No new editors with fundamentally new ways of manipulating text or amazingly compelling features are emerging. I actually don’t mind reinventions of the wheel either, as long as the reinvention delivers a much better wheel. For instance, the Vim source code is not the most modular, extensible or maintainable. And it is in C — not that there is anything wrong with it, but I think an object oriented language is better for a complex piece of software like Vim.
The only recent buzz has been about Textmate and the many clones it has since inspired. I’m really looking forward to Yzis reach a usable milestone. What are other promising editors out there that you are excited about?