24 Sep 09 I <3 Vim

I love the text editor Vim. I started using Vi because I really didn’t know any better around 1988 when I was first teaching myself C on my trusty Amiga 500. Not long after that I discovered Vim which sported many improvements over the venerable Vi. Sometime around 1993-1994 I started hacking Vim. I added a complete ARexx port to Vim so that you could script it. Alas, a new version of Vim came out right after I finished, and author Bram Moolenaar had changed the code so much I felt it was impossible to merge my changes into the new version. This was when I was a young pup programmer, and I was unfamiliar with revision control and difference/merging tools. I had fun doing it anyway, so I just chalked it up to experience.

I have used Vim on every programming task at every job I’ve had. I’m constantly learning new things about it, and the commands and keystrokes are now part of my DNA. I don’t even think how to execute commands anymore and I am often hard pressed to recall them to others learning Vim. I have to sit at a keyboard with Vim running in order to understand what my fingers are doing.

A while back, I discovered the auto-complete feature, where you type Ctrl-n in insert mode and Vim will attempt to complete the word you are typing based on all the words in all buffers and how frequently they occur. This is incredibly handy when programming to quickly pound out those function and variable names. I used “imap <S-Tab> <C-n>” in my .vimrc file to map this to shift-tab, which I felt was more convenient.

I also picked up a really handy way to cycle through all your buffers.  I used the tab and shift-tab mapping mentioned in that Vim tip. Combine that with Vim’s tab feature I can very easily find the file I am looking for.

And finally I had another big “wow, Vim can do that?” moment just last week. Since version 7, Vim has sported an “omni-complete” framework. Basically it is an architecture for people to hang code completion routines into Vim. In fact, right out of the box, Vim 7 has support for Javascript, CSS, and yes, even Python! Python completion is only available if you are using a version of Vim that has been compiled with Python support (e.g. on Ubuntu). Imagine my shock when I was editing a CSS file and I typed “display:” and then hit Ctrl-X Ctrl-O for the first time and a drop down list of all the possible values (inline, block, none, etc) appeared! No more hunting for that w3schools website. And the Python support is just as handy. Type “os.path.” followed by Ctrl-X Ctrl-O and you can see all the entities and function in the os.path module. I had no idea!

So all of this reminds me it is time to once again donate to the Vim project. Thanks Bram for all your amazing work you do on this invaluable tool.

P.S. I have no interest in the great editor holy war. Use a tool that you find intuitive and useful and learn it, back to front. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with other popular editors. But for me, Vim is it. I can’t imagine how many hours of productivity it has given me over the years.

Tags: vim