I use neovim
, which is mostly compatible with all vim
plugins and apis.
vim-pathogen loads my plugins
I use a few plugins to give me a better editing/navigation experience.
ctrlp.vim
fuzzy-search to find files in the project by namenerdtree
file tree navigatorsyntastic
syntax highlighting and lintingvim-better-whitespace
cleans up whitespace as I save filesvim-indent-guides
displays alternating colors to vizualize indentation
My vim config isn't very wild, just enough things to make me happy, I've included it here for the curious.
There are lots of places you can find people sing the praises of editing text with vim. And vim is great for editing text, but that's not really why I chose vim. My reasons for learning/choosing vim are fairly boring:
- vim is free
- vim is on the terminal and starts quickly
- vim is everywhere (on servers, etc.)
- vim has staying power
Before finding vim I used
Eclipse
,RadRails
,TextMate
,SublimeText
, andSublimeText 2
. They've all passed peak-popularity or ceased development altogether. In the time since choosing vim I've seenAtom
andVSCode
pop up. That's a lot of editors in less than 15 years. Vim has been around for along time appears to
- you have to learn vim in order to use it
You can't use vim without learning how to use it. Other editors have a lot of nice features, but you can use them the same way you'd use notepad. I'm lazy and the restriction helps.
Vim has a reputation for being difficult/confusing, but really vim is not that difficult to understand and use. You can learn enough vim to use vim in an afternoon.