Vim can save your hands too!
04. Sep, 2006 
9 Comments
Shortly after getting my MacBook Pro, I realized that I had to change the way I used text editors. I wound up using the fn key so often that I started wearing a callous on my left pinky finger. And as a regular emacs user, all of the CTRL-this and CTRL-that was wearing thin fast (and that’s with the caps lock key mapped to CTRL like God intended).
At OSCON this year, I attended Damian Conway’s Vim tutorial. It was basically a 3 hour demo / Vim love-fest. I was amazed at how quickly he could navigate and edit text using vim. What really attracted me was his emphasis on efficiency – using the minimum number of keystrokes to accomplish the task.
If you’ve never used vi/vim, you need to realize that vim is a modal editor – when not in insert mode, all keys are available as command keys. This effectively eliminates most of the awkward CTRL- META- keystrokes from other editors.
So I’ve been slowly making the switch to vim, and last week I decided to speed up my conversion by forcing myself to edit all of my Ruby and C++ code using vim. It was slow at first, but I gradually picked up speed over the week. I don’t think I’m as fast as emacs in all scenarios, but in some common ones (e.g. change the name of a variable) I’m definitely faster than emacs.
For my C++ code, I decided to try out ViEmu, a vim emulator for Visual Studio. This let me use vim key bindings within Visual Studio. A word of warning – you’ll need to manually remove some of the default bindings to CTRL-this and CTRL-that in VS 2005 if you want the corresponding vim key bindings to work. Apparently this will be fixed in a future release – this will make the out-of-box experience much better.
I used Jonathan McPherson’s Efficient Editing with Vim page a lot during my transition. This document cuts to the chase and does a really good job of telling you what commands are really useful (and there are a lot of commands in vim).
For a more comprehensive resource, I’m using Steve Oualline’s vim book. It’s a bit dated (it’s current as of Vim 5.7), but most of what I’m interested in hasn’t changed all that much. But the price is certainly right. Thanks, Steve!
I use the vim-ruby configuration files for setting up vim to work with Ruby. The syntax coloring and code formatting features work great. I’ve created a coloring scheme that’s based on the Vibrant Ink by Justin Palmer. This is what it looks like:
Here’s my .vimrc code that defines the color scheme:
highlight Normal guifg=White guibg=Black
highlight Cursor guifg=Black guibg=Yellow
highlight Keyword guifg=#FF6600
highlight Define guifg=#FF6600
highlight Comment guifg=#9933CC
highlight Type guifg=White gui=NONE
highlight rubySymbol guifg=#339999 gui=NONE
highlight Identifier guifg=White gui=NONE
highlight rubyStringDelimiter guifg=#66FF00
highlight rubyInterpolation guifg=White
highlight rubyPseudoVariable guifg=#339999
highlight Constant guifg=#FFEE98
highlight Function guifg=#FFCC00 gui=NONE
highlight Include guifg=#FFCC00 gui=NONE
highlight Statement guifg=#FF6600 gui=NONE
highlight String guifg=#66FF00
highlight Search guibg=White
But the really cool thing about vim is that you can extend it using Ruby! More on this in a future post.
You can also do a bunch of fun stuff with both remote mode and the WIN32API calls for vim.
I’m a heavy user altough not an expert with Vi and derivatives. I do like the fact that there is a version of Vi in almost any platform. Most of the time I use Vi in Solaris but also have it on my Windows PC and in my FC4 partition.
I like simplicity and with Vi that’s the name of the game.
Seems like I only leave commercial messages on your blog, John.
We added vi keybindings to Komodo this go-round, alphas still available for free at http://www.activestate.com/komodo
I personally find it still strange using vi keybindings in a GUI editor, but you can’t beat the dot command.
On topic, back in college we used to play vi golf games — carry out a task in the fewest number of keystrokes. Knowing how to use m, single-quote, and Unix commands can get you quite far relatively quickly.
I think we have a convert… haha, happy viming.
vi golf? Wow. I bow before you, Eric!
Did you consider using TextMate?
I do use TextMate in a limited set of cases (like editing blog entries). However, I really need a cross platform editor (Windows / Mac) as well as having something with a very efficient input model. TextMate isn’t cross-platform, so that’s a bit of a deal-breaker for me since I spend most of my time writing code on Windows.
I used vi almost exclusively for four years while in college. It was made clear early on by upper-classmen that vi was the cool editor, emacs was for the “weird” people, and there was a third editor (I forget the name) that was for “dummies”.
I became an advanced vi ‘er, but after 10+ years of Visual Studio and other BRIEF editors I don’t know if I’d even know where to begin with vi anymore. It’s good to see that that editing model is so widely available though.
Thanks for your initial VibrantInk port to Vim!
I made an actual Vim color scheme out of it, and added support for 256 color terminals.
More info: http://blog.jozilla.be/articles/2006/10/05/vibrantink-theme-for-vim
Download:
http://jozilla.be/data/scripts/vibrantink.vim
Cheers!