The first lines of code I ever wrote was in an editor which had plenty of the features bundled in. But the funny thing was that you would never use most of them.
The code editor I am talking about is Eclipse. Now don’t get me wrong, it is an awesome code editor. It’s just that it was memory intensive and and because of that it ran slow. And my PC isn’t something I can boast about.
Everyone hates lag, amirite?
I wanted a code editor where I have the power to use it the way I want. Which used minimal memory with the flexibility to specify the features I wanted and scale up as my requirements increased.
Enter Vim
Now I was recently pointed to Vim by my mentor.
To tell you the truth, I used to avoid this code editor because the concepts here were not like the other code editors. Even to perform a simple select and copy was so drastically different from the other code editors.
I’ve been using Vim for the past month, and I have to tell you – once you’ve set up your vim to the way you want it to behave (I’m talking key mappings, auto commands, etc), every time you try using another editor you’ll feel like something’s missing. Probably a bad thing, incase you have to use different machines a lot.
What I loved about it
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Extensive Documentation - Vim has existed for a long time and gone through many transformations. There are plenty of good documentation and tutorials available online. Any problem you face, there is probably someone out there who has already faced it. Google is your friend!
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Extensibility - This is probably the best feature of Vim. There are plenty of plugins out there which can help you out in what ever task/use case you can imagine. And what with the ease of adding plugins, you could have your own unique fully fledged IDE. Vim Awesome has an extensive list of every kind plugin you could possibly think of.
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Personalization - Vim is a beast with a tremendous pride. If its your first time, you will be ripped apart. But once you have the knowledge to use it, you can bend it to your will (GOL HAH DOV!). It definitely messed up my head the first week I used it. But soon I was comfortable with it and my mouse probably started feeling lonely (but not while playing Counter Strike). http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ is an awesome place to learn VimScript which will help you in modifying your Vim.
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Speed - I’ve opened a lot of buffers at once, but there was no drop in performance. Of course, I don’t have THAT many plugins installed. But NO LAG, ‘nuff said.
Conclusion
One thing though. the first time I started off, I used a pre-configured vimrc. After a while I realized it was a bad idea because I had no idea what was in there or how it was configured. DON’T PUT ANYTHING IN YOUR .vimrc WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT IT DOES.
And what’s personalization if you aren’t the one doing it, no?