Going oldschool with VIM

Lets face it, there is certainly no shortage of editors and IDE’s out there today. One would think that command line editors like VI or VI iMproved, Nano, Emacs, etc. should die a really sudden, quick and painless death. Yet, you’d be sorely mistaken. These editors will stay the editors of choice on any *nix server that does not have a GUI installed. Plus what could be simpler than typing
sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
to edit system configuration files?

Me and Charl also had a discussion about how hardcore old school geeks swear by it, doing all their programming in these editors. You’d wonder why. I sure did, so I whipped out vimtutor and sharpened the ol’ VIM skills. Now, working with it more and more and getting used to all the shortcuts and keystrokes, it is becoming clearer by the day why it remains the editor of choice for hardcore geeks. It makes it fast! I’m by no means a hardcore geek, but I do see why they like it.

Admittedly, it is quite a learning curve, but once you are used to the commands its much quicker raking in those keystrokes than it is clicking all over some editor to get your rocks on!

It has got really good syntax highlighting and just in case you are afraid you will sorely miss your IDE’s tabbed open document interface you can easily open as much terminal windows as needed to suit your needs. All in all, I think I’ll stay a little longer with VIM than what I expected…

Multiple windows with VIM

PHP syntax highlighting

Python syntax highlighting

3 Comments to "Going oldschool with VIM"

• Justin Hartman said: On 09/20/2007 at 11:16 am

  I’m a VIM fan but VI experts will claim you should never use VIM at all on servers as it creates a security risk. My issue with this is I learned everything I know on VIM and it is surprising how different the command variations are between VI and VIM.

• Neil Blakey-Milner said: On 09/20/2007 at 11:55 am

  Stii: There aren’t many GUI editors that have the expressive power of vi (and, by extension, vim) and (I can’t believe I’m being nice to it) emacs and that’s why there will always be interest in them. Geeks generally like the streamline their productive work to only worrying about the important things. Trying to remember which menu to use, or having to switch to using the mouse for some things, is counter-productive.

  Justin: I’d love to know who your vi experts are - I wouldn’t worry about security risks from installing vim on servers. And to know _which_ vi derivative they were using - the original vi isn’t exactly available on any remotely modern operating systems.

• Stii said: On 09/20/2007 at 1:25 pm

  Thanx guys! Neil, the more I dig into VIM, the more I realise its extreme power. I’m loving it! Every day learning something new.

  What I find extremely handy is the fact that you can write a certain block of text in a file into a new file (:5, 10 w newfile.php -> will write lines 5 to 10 into a new file called newfile.php). Nah, there is a bunch of powerful features that I don’t think I can live without anymore.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Kick-ass Tools, PHP, Programming, Python by: Stii