You are a professional. Your work is your craft. And you should have the best tools available.
Vim is a great programmer editor…and you need to get it: A blog raising awareness around this editor.
Vim is a great programmer editor…and you need to get it. I know, I know, it’s not that easy. If you are used to other editors and have been for a long time, then it’s going to be hard to pick up something new. But Vim is an extension of Vi.
Vi has been around since 1976, and it’s good because it’s old. It was designed by programmers for programmers, and has been battle-tested over the years in every scenario imaginable. That’s not good just because of tradition—it’s good because the problems people are trying to solve haven’t changed all that much since then.
You may have already heard about all the great things about Vim (Vim is so powerful! You can do almost anything with Vim!). But there is two things that make Vim really valuable:
There is a learning curve, but once you get past that then you will be able to work more efficiently than ever before. There are three little words that can change your life:
vimtutor in Terminal.
I promise this isn’t a trick, it will help! The vimtutor program will walk you through the basics of how to use vim and help you get into the right mindset for using this editor as
Vim is a great programmer editor…and you need to get it.
Let’s start with the basics:
1. Vim is a programmer’s text editor.
2. You can use it to edit any kind of plain text.
3. It’s cross-platform (works in Linux, Mac and Windows).
4. It’s free and open source.
You may have heard that Vim is hard to learn, or even “extremely difficult”, but I believe anyone can master it – if you’re willing to give it time and dedication! And once you’re fluent in Vim, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a powerful tool that will help you become a more efficient coder.
You’re a developer. And you want to be a better developer, right? You’re constantly looking for ways to improve your development environment.
You’ve heard the buzz about the Vim text editor. VIM is a great programmer editor: it lets you do everything in one editor, keeps your hands on the keyboard and is easy to master. It even helps you write better code, by keeping you away from the mouse.
You’ve tried it out in the past, but it didn’t stick. It was too confusing, or weird, or just too different!
And so you keep on using Notepad++ or Sublime or Atom or VSCode or whatever other editor you use (I won’t judge…or I will) and keep hearing about how much better Vim is than your editor of choice.
But there are so many reasons why Vim is great: good documentation and free training materials, it runs on anything and everywhere, it has a huge community behind it…and there are even more reasons why it would be good for you to learn Vim!
Vim is easy to customize and configure…except for one thing: getting started with Vim can be hard! But don’t worry
I’ll be honest, I was a little bit hesitant to put this in the list as I feel it is a little too sales-y. However, I believe that vim is really an amazing editor and you should try it out. This post will tell you all about why.
I’ve been on a search for the perfect programmer editor since I made my first web pages at 14. I even started my own website where I reviewed text editors!
I’m always looking for something that can make me more productive. And, after trying out a lot of different editors, IDE’s and programming environments, I always come back to vim.
Most of us spend our lives in a text editor. In fact, if you are a programmer, your text editor is your primary tool and you deserve to choose the best one.
I spent many years in Sublime Text, but I eventually became frustrated at how often I was hitting the edge of its capabilities. I decided to switch to Vim and it has made me a much more efficient programmer.
Vim is an extremely powerful text editor available on all platforms (including Windows). The learning curve is steep, but once you have mastered it, Vim will make you a faster, more focused and more efficient programmer. It’s an investment that will quickly pay dividends.
This post is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to Vim (there are many online) but rather some of the key concepts and tips that helped me learn Vim and what continues to make it great for me today.
One of the most popular posts on this blog has been my series on why programmers should learn Vim. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I encourage you to do so.
So why am I writing about Vim again? Recently I’ve heard more and more comments from programmers who say that they tried Vim and don’t like it. Those people are missing out. Sure, learning how to use Vim will take some effort and time, but in the end it is well worth it.
I’m going to try my best in this post to explain why you should give Vim another chance.