Artful Code

I’m a vim user myself but I use TexMate at work on our Rails project and I just wanted to point out that all the TextMate shortcuts you dislike can be trivially remapped to anything you like. I made my own bundle with remappings for all of my commonly used stuff in about 20 minutes. Cheers!

I’ a vim user and I love it more than any editor. I’m using vim for rails development also . inspired from this http://www.akitaonrails.com/2009/1/4/rails-on-vim-in-english

Vim indentation is programmable as well as Vim syntax highlighting. This feature just appears later than highlighting, and therefore the library of good indentation modes is not as rich as library of good highlighting modes. But if you want me to write an indentation mode for newLISP… I do not give a promise, but I’ll consider this. ;-)

I really like Sublime Text, but’s its Windows only. I actually wrote a blog entry about it today if you care to look at it.

On UNIX, its vim for me!

jEdit, its everything textmate wishes it was, fully bindable, split windows h/v.. metric tonnes of plugins. jEdit rocks, as long as you run the current dev version (as the stable is old, but they wont mark the dev releases as stable)

I think you might like plan9 tools such as the “sam” editor or “acme” editor.

good luck — its your most important tool as a programmer

Yup, on windows i use Sublime Text too:

- split windows
- auto-complete
- plugin system
- project support
- powerful search and replace (also regex based)
- syntax coloring
- dark background (more readable IMHO)
- minimap (if you care about it)

L.

Kate has a vim mode, great highlighting / etc support, and a front-end to changing keybindings, and adding your own to plugins. Usually working with it is similar to vim, but then you hit some unbound (or more likely, very obscure and useless) vim button, and there you go, you’re browsing which file to switch to, or just activated some plugin to go-to-source of the method name your cursor is on. Good stuff.

For very basic html / css hackjobs, there’s an alpha of inType, which does multi-line selection and style very very well. Windows, however.

What about Espresso?

While I love vim’s movement commands, I also curse them for making it completely impossible for me to switch to any other editor, say, one with a decent scripting language.

Anyway, if you’re a vim learner, the best way to increase your power is searching github for ‘dotfiles’ or ‘vimrc’ (or use google to do it). There are some quite amazing plugins e.g. Jamis’ TextMate FuzzyFinder extension, rails.vim, TabLine, Snippets..

Echoing your sentiments, indentation is a pain, and autocompletion is worse than it should be (Omni not a superset of standard in-buffer completion? wtf)

I don’t know if this is what you’re running into, but one common problem with vim’s python indentation is that you have both “filetype indent on” and “set smartindent” set. If there’s indentation found for a filetype it’s always better than just smartindent, but it doesn’t turn smartindent off automatically. And smartindent does some annoying things like always moving ‘#’s into column 0, under the assumption they’re preprocessor directives, not comments.

If you have filetype plugins enabled (my .vimrc says “filetype plugin indent on”, which I think was the default), you can add a “setlocal nosi” to a .vim/ftplugin/python.vim (or if you want to split it up to allow multiple python ftplugins, I use .vim/ftplugin/python/settings.vim) to make sure smartindent is off when editing python files. My ftplugin/python/settings.vim has:

setlocal softtabstop=4
setlocal shiftwidth=4
setlocal expandtab
setlocal smarttab
setlocal nosmartindent

" Options for python syntax highlighting
let python_highlight_all = 1
let python_slow_sync = 1


There’s also a newer, better python.vim syntax file on vim.org. Make sure you download the 2.x version, not 3.x, and drop it into ~/.vim/syntax/python.vim.

Opps, those options for the python syntax highlighting seem to have dropped outside the code block. They’re part of my .vim/ftplugin/python/settings.vim file too, and just do stuff like turn on highlighting of mismatched spaces and tries to keep it from losing its highlighting when editing a large file.

One of the best editors i know is Scribes.
It has a very radical approach, with a limited featureset.
But everything is very well implemented

I use vim for just about everything, especially after leaning about :set paste.

But when I need a mouse, I find Gnome’s gedit to be rather amazing.

/Nat

I wish TextMate would exist on GNU/Linux. Until a decent and modern text editor exists for Linux I am very happy for Emacs.

I’ve just recently seriously begun my Emacs journey,

:set mouse=a

Now try scrolling, clicking on text and clicking on tabs.

Since you[r poll] asked: My “Other” vote is: Diakonos. An extremely user-friendly, yet featureful console editor.

With Vim, you can go on almost any machine and fire it up as well. TextMate can’t do that.

Vim is a programmers/system-administrators army knife, while TextMate is a really nice can-opener.

Good write up.

I as well love vim and use it exclusively on linux.

However, one thing i find funny, on windows i use e – text editor, a clone of textmate. E solves both of your major gripes with textmate split windows and configurable key bindings.

“C, in particular, tends toward long functions…”

eh? Unless you often have switch statements with loads of cases for some weird reason, that seems a strange thing to say.

Back when I was using Homesite to build websites (funny, huh), my coworker, who was a guru, used Vim. Naturally, because I was a poser and wanted to be like him, I struggled my way up the Vi learning curve. Best thing I ever did for my code.

Since we’re talking customization, let’s bring themes into the mix:

http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/8

For programming on the Windows platform I just power up .

Zeus – http://www.zeusedit.com/whatsnew.html

I prefer Scite. It isn’t as minimalist as Vim, but it is very lightweight and is extensible via Lua.

I started using it when learning assembly language in college. Things clicked. ;)

I love Vim, but I recently made the switch to Emacs for org-mode, which I can now not live without. Seriously, it is one of the best scripts I have ever encountered. But I also have to say the Emacs handles indentation better than any editor I have ever used. Emacs is a never ending train ride of configuration. Emacs-lisp is an archaic cluster fuck of parenthesis, and after nearly four months of using Emacs, I still do not understand. Yeah I could learn emacs lisp, but that would take time. I knew vimscript almost immediately because it almost looks like shell script. Just my two cents.

Major nit – Vim is an *enhancement* of vi.

‘Over the years, Vim has gently washed away all of the “features” of an editor that actually get in the programmer’s way’ is wrong, they weren’t there in the first place!

Those of us who grew up in the Late Cretaceous and whose first experience of a “full screen editor” was vi on BSD UNIX made do with a much smaller command set than is supplied by vim/gvim, not to mention no colours or automatic re-formatting or all those other niceties that Vim has added.

Two of Vim’s features really stand out for me: reformatting text and retabbing a document. I love being able to convert a file’s tabs to spaces just by typing :retab. It is much more efficient than having to go through two levels of menus in TextMate.

You’re gonna have to update your (otherwise nice) article on that one. TextMate has a “Select bundle item” command (not sure on the keybinding, on windows right now. But e-editor has ctrl-alt-t). It’s very useful, since its hard to remember all the bundle key bindings, or even what commands are available. So for certain things I’ve learned the name of the command rather than the binding (I type “entities” to select the convert to html entities command)

I totally agree on file load speed and search and replace though. I haven’t felt the need for split screen, but I can see how it can be useful. I do hope TextMate 2 fixes these issues (and that it’s released soon).

Hi, long time Vim user, first time commenter :)

Not got a lot to add to all this, really. One thing I love about Vim is that I can copy my .vimrc to various servers I have shell accounts on and use the exact same configuration via ssh as I do in MacVim.

Just one point though … what is it about Terminal that is NOT easily scriptable? It’s a standard bash shell, same as just about any Linux distro.

gedit on linux for me. Straight-up vi for quick editing. gedit had a whole bunch of things I never knew it had until I enabled the plugins and snippets…

Great. Just the post I needed to inspire confidence. I’ve been dissatisfied with the aforementioned loading times of all major IDEs and after giving emacs I try I just couldn’t bear the idea of using modifier keys for the simplest tasks like moving around a document. Navigation in general seems fairly complex.

Vim on the other hand is snappy, quick to load, and easy to navigate. Thanks for the reassurance!

I’m using PIDA with medit as editor component. But most use PIDA with VIM and some Emacs. I’m running trunk, btw. Last real release i way to old :-) but soon…

ps: your page is broken. back button on comment error page makes the text disapear. one of the most annoying bugs !!!

I use Emacs with Vim key bindings (Viper + wimpulse.el). I love it.

VIM FTW!
VIM FTW!
VIM FTW!
VIM FTW!
VIM FTW!

Simple, vim is THE best editor :)

Sorry, VIM is handy only when emacs is not around (not in default installation in most *nix dist. For me, emacs rocks. If i need something more managable, TextMate is my best friend.

Since your a Mac user, give MacVim a try. It’s VIM beautifully integrated into Mac.

Good article. Except for the last statement about OS X’s terminal not being scriptable. What exactly do you mean by that? The terminal shell is bash, easily (one of) the most scriptable shell interface(s) on the planet. Always remember that your pretty Mac UI is a fully certified UNIX OS underneath, and that your terminal is your interface into that underlying OS. Whatever you wan to script in that shell, I assure you that you can do it.

I love Vim. It’s an excellent editor for someone with small fingers (Emacs kicks all sorts of booty, but the modifier keys are RSI-inducing if you try to use them at speed with short fingers).

The apparent stagnation of Textmate led me to trying out MacVim, which I liked lots and from there I started testing all sorts of FLOSS applications with a view to replacing what I was using daily. I found out that Inkscape and Gimp did what I needed them to and so I could kiss goodbye to hefty Adobe licences (I design for screen only so no need for CMYK in Gimp). After that I just took the plunge – ditched OS X to go fully FLOSS.

And I’m loving it.

I really tried to like textmate but realized I would be paying 50 dollars for the command-T functionality because that’s the only thing I found useful.
No thanks.
I’ll stick with macvim.

I can’t believe nobody has mentioned Komodo Edit (the free one — Komodo IDE costs money). It has vi keybindings. The support is not extensive to the point of being able to say ‘this is vim embedded in komodo’, but it’s pretty good, and world’s better than the attempts I’ve seen at a vim plugin for textmate. The vim keybindings support a good amount of the movement functionality, which is really the bulk of what I want (need, really: if I don’t have it I end up with j’s and k’s in my code).

It supports h,j,k,l, find using ‘/’ and ‘n’ for ‘next’, moving by word, $ and 0 for begin/end of line, G to jump to a line number (or just ‘G’ to jump to end of file), x, dd, Y, p/P, zc/zo for code-folding… there’s more I’m not remembering to be sure. It even supports :w, which will open a ‘save as…’ dialog for new files. Unfortunately, if you want to save the current file under a different name, you still have to use the menus for that for whatever reason, but you get a lot of features, and the editor doesn’t slow down a bit. I’ve been using it for at least a couple years now.

I use vim if I have to edit remote code, and I’ve recently started playing with MacVim to see if it adds any benefit (I can’t find one at first glance). I’m always on the lookout for a “killer editor”, though :)

vim definitely, i’ve tried textmate and coda for a hot minute, but why bother…vim is more advanced and if you know all the commands, faster than the latter will ever be plus i can use it if I am in ssh, on an ever popular ubuntu/redhat orr windows. if i want something more its straight into eclipse.

I also love Vim. The modal editing model is, simply put, the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, by design, it’s not very flexible. I read that vi was designed to interface with other unix applications that would handle non-editing tasks, while vi itself was only supposed to be a pure editor. Integrating your editor into your workflow – debugging etc. – is absolutely essential.

I was hungering for that kind of integration, and therefore I’m currently using Emacs with Vimpulse (an enhanced version of viper-mode), and loving it. Of course it doesn’t quite feel like 100% vim when editing (I’d say I’m at about 95% of my pure-vim editing efficiency), but the integration of external features (debugging, etc) is very attractive to me. On the whole, I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds. I still have Vim’s editing efficiency, while getting access to emacs’ crazy extensibility and all those IDE-attributes that Vim was never intended to take on. I could say that my editor is still Vim, but the IDE is Emacs.

Has anyone been through a similar experience?

Some things are just not as polished in vim though (relative to textmate) that still have me frustrated. For example, despite how great file navigation is, it’s often nice to have a project tree (especially when first learning rails), so I installed NERDTree. Ok, fine, but now when you’re in nerd tree and you start doing things you have to remember to leave the nerdtree window and move back to your main window or else you can end up opening things in the nerd tree buffer.

For example, I use command-t plugin (way better than fuzzy finder btw), but if you are in the nerdTree buffer and try to open a file with command-t, it’ll open the file in the nerdTree buffer. You can get around with this by hitting ctrl-k first but that’s sort of a pain.

Right now I’m also having issues with code folding in vim, I’m using indent as the ‘foldmethod’ type, and the behavior is just really odd. I’m sure I’ll get it worked out as to what’s wrong, but the time I have to constantly spend ‘mucking around’ in vim – with my .vimrc file, plugins, etc gets very time consuming. (I know it should pay off in the end, but it seems to be a never ending thing I’m having to do.)