Any Vim freaks in here? Want to share your vim story?

[Niki]

A few days ago I did it. I uninstalled Vista and I'm now a full time Linux user. I never found a great distribution that fitted me well, but now I got it. After trying Redhat(old days), Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Suse, Slackware, Mandrake(old days), Debian and even LFS I discovered Arch Linux. Man this distro really suits me well. It's very minimalistic, you start with a bare bone install that uses around 30Mb's of ram and then you build the environment you want on top of that. It has a very great package manager called pacman, and it uses a rolling release model so there are never big releases, just regular packet updates.

I installed Openbox as windowmanager to keep it all in the arch philosophy of keeping it simple. In Vista I used E-texteditor which really is a very nice text editor. It has support for textmate bundles and tends to keep thing very simple too. Problem is that E doesn't run very well on linux, so I had to find myself a new texteditor.

I wanted a very light weight text-editor with support for Ruby on Rails, and if possible ftp support to write/change files on a dedicated server directly. Eventually I picked Vim, it has everything I wanted and I could edit files trough an ssh connection directly on the server. I'm reading a lot about Vim and practicing a lot and I'm starting to know how things work. I'm starting to feel the power that Vim has. But I wanted to know if there are other vimmers on these forums who wanted to share their own Vim experience.

Note: I feel that using a minimalistic setup really boosts my productivity. And I think once I'm really used to Vim I'm unstoppable :-d

[SomebodySomewhere]

You poor bastard.


p.s. just kidding

[Niki]

Ah so You are an emacs user I suppose ? :-D

[SomebodySomewhere]

Nope. Primarily a windows developer(.NET) using Visual Studio. Although I also work with php on Linux (also for work) and I don't particularly care for Vi, I usually just edit on windows and upload to the linux servers

[ragtag]

I use emacs for all my text editing. Dabbled a little in Vi, which is handy for editing files on servers where emacs is not installed (Vi almost always is). I'm not religious either way, and have considered trying to learn Vi to the same level I know emacs.

I believe the main difference is that emacs is much bigger and tries to do everything internally, while Vi relies on you using the tools on your system for a lot of things (awk, diff, screen etc.).

That said, a month ago when I needed to do some php work on Windows, after trying a couple of GUI editors, I installed emacs on it. Having never to touch the mouse when coding is very VERY handy, and I believe increases productivity a lot.

So go Vi, emacs, Joe, Kate...whatever.

[Rose of Cairo]

Yipeee, another vim fan here I love vim. It's very powerful.

I've been using debian and vim for years now, so I cannot really compare with other editors, but I just love vim. I find it very practical and especially love that it's a console editor. I too love simple and minimalistic light weight apps.

For the same reason my window manager's fvwm, do you know it? It's quite ascetic. I configured it so that I don't need the mouse, and for many things I don't need to look at the monitor either. I can do everything with the keyboard, so I almost never have to take the hands away from it.

I also configured the keyboard in my own way in order to type more quickly, since I often need the Umlaute for german, the accents and cédille for french, and various special signs on good places to program easier. Now I have everything in the same layout and I'm happy.

All this together is very efficient.

Never heard of Arch Linux, I'll have a look at it, thanks

edit: I totally agree that having never to touch the mouse when coding is very VERY handy, and increases productivity a lot.

[WageMage]

You know... I really like my Mac. It's got the right combo of stability and integration of casual (email, IM, browser) applications, form factor, looks and (surprisingly important) fonts and rendering to make it the best possible outrageously glorified xterm launcher

People don't get it when they look at my big multiple screens and see a bunch of terminals, all of them running ssh connections to whatever servers I'm coding on at the moment, with vim front-and-centre. vim under screen on a mac terminal give me the right environment to let my kung-foo flow strong, with minimal brain-to-sourcefile noise creep.

[Rivelli]

vim is amazing

[ericwmontgomery]

Congrats on finding a setup that works well for you. I've used Archlinux for a while and I love the minimalistic aspect of it as well... It reminded me a lot of Gentoo but with a superior package manager.

I still have one machine that runs Arch, but recently switched the other one to Ubuntu. Funny how I always say that everything in Ubuntu "just works", but really that's only the case if you want to use their nicely tuned Gnome setup. I've switched it to use Openbox instead and I'm hitting almost as many bumps to smooth out as I did with Arch... Sigh. Gotta love linux though, warts and all. Putting in the effort to tweak it is always worth it.

I've used vim for a couple years now too, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what it's really capable of. Definitely my editor of choice though. Thanks for posting your experience.

-Eric

[JimOfferman]

You bunch of geeks!

(terminal windows freak me out, fortunately there is Coda for me)

[Lauxa]

I like vi because you can do everything from the keyboard instead of having to go through menus. Using the mouse too much makes my wrist ache. I also like being able to search/replace on regular expressions.

[andrew]

When I'm in a shell, I totally use vim.

When I'm on my mac developing, Textmate is god. OS X is the best of both worlds: unix core with terminal and the incredible and beautiful apps and ui.

BTW: How do you find vim for Rails compared to TM? TM feels like it was MADE for rails.

[Niki]

It sucks that TM is not available for linux. I've seen and heard many good things about it. But Vim with the Vim.rails plugin is go(o)d too. And I just buyed a new pc, but was thinking about buying a mac. The only thing it would add for me was TM and a GUI I don't like, so I just bought a bunch of hardware components for the price of a cheap mac, and it gives me a dual monitor, q6700 quadcore power machine.

For now I switched to OpenSuse 11(RC1) and KD4. Man, KDE4 is already rock solid and it looks sooooo nice.Especially on OpenSuse. I don't plan to start using arch again because of the long installation and configuration time.Currently I have better things to do.

OpenSuse is a distro I never liked. But with version 11 RC(1) I'm impressed. Especially because this is the first distro where you can feel how speedy KDE4 is compared to KDE3. I tried Kubuntu but it was slow, reacted slown, etc. OpenSuse 11 with KDE4 is just click and boom, SUPER fast!

Linux is really starting to grow up. I like it

[ericwmontgomery]

I've been eagerly awaiting KDE4 for a long time, but the two live CDs I've tried (Kubuntu was one, can't remember the other) haven't impressed me... I'm hoping sometime soon I can use it and be happy

I've been wanting a mac ever since seeing Rails/Textmate screencasts... I'm feeling the mac envy but haven't taken the plunge yet. Still planning to though.