Since I touched the keyboard for the first time when I was thirteen I never stop self-cultivating myself in the area. I even became a programmer and doomed myself on reading endless docs, tutorials and books. In one these books, called The Pragmatic Programmer, there was a chapter about tools used by programmers where the opinion was told that it is better to know one editor very well, and use it for all editing tasks.
I agreed and decided to follow this advice. The only difficulty was to pick up the right editor, but since I wanted to be super/mega cool programmer the variants were obvious: VIM or Emacs. I chose VIM, to be honest, for one reason: because of horrible (in my opinion) Emacs key bindings.
I can almost hear you guys laughing and saying something like “Good luck, man!”. And taking into consideration learning curves of these editors I can understand you. But I did my best and after a couple of months struggling through official/non-official documentation, dozens of dot-files I could finally exit that damn editor without breaking anything. My productivity increased noticeably. I liked that way I could edit text without even touching a mouse flitting across the text with every key stroke.
I’ve been using Vim for about 4 years for now. And I still think I know only about 30% of it’s possibilities, I still find new variants of configurations. Actually the recipe for successful working with Vim is quite simple:
- read docs
- apply rasp
- do your work
- repeat
As a programmer I used Vim for source code editing, but since Vim is not an IDE I had to apply some effort to make it more convenient for that purpose. And again: tons of documentation, articles about turning Vim into The-Best-IDE-Ever-Created, dozens of plugins and so on. But no matter how hard I tried the truth was disappointing - I spent too much time learning/configuring my tool instead of doing some work with it. I thought too much not about what I’m doing but about HOW I’m doing it.
So now the time has come to abandon Vim as my IDE and choose some more appropriate tool. R.I.P. Vim as IDE.