A week with Vim

During the past week I’ve been learning to use Vim (gVim). Day 1 and 2 weren’t fun to say the least. But now I’m completely hooked. I’m the type of person who will sit there for hours customizing my development environment until I think it’s perfect. I’ve been playing with almost every cool plugin i can find (and wasting a lot of time in the process).

vim cheatsheet

So Vim is, without a doubt, the best text editor I’ve ever used. However, that’s all it is. It’s just a text editor and I know a lot people don’t agree with me on this one, but IDE’s do help. They just make everything better. Therefore the ultimate combination would be an ide with vim as the text editor.

Netbeans jVi is the first thing I tried and it was far too limiting when you’re already used to Vim. I think this plugin would be good to someone who wished to add some Vim-like functionality to netbeans as opposed to making the netbeans text editor perfectly emulate vim7.

Vim (NerdTree, Sessions, OmniComplete w/ctags, etc..) is what I tried next. I wanted to see if I could turn vim into a sort of IDE like setup with plugins. Although I can’t give any specific reasons why, I didn’t like it…

EClim (Vim + Eclipse): I’m not a huge fan of eclipse because it’s just too slow. But after finding out about eclim I had to try it out. Basically you can either embed vim into eclipse, or have eclipse running as a daemon and vim connects to it. The results were very nice aside from one thing: it was slow which kind of defeats the purpose of vim.

So atm i’m still looking for the idea setup. One thing that I’ve really wanted to try was

Although ViEmu is just another emulator, the idea of using vim with visual assist x sounds incredible. However, this setup would have a serious implication …. switching to windows. I don’t feel comfortable developing on a virtual machine so a dual boot might be in order.