I'm a bit torn. I love the controls in vim, the way you navigate and manipulate text is a brilliant system. It makes it more efficient and more "fun".
However, I really don't like the configuration system for vim. Reading the article above, I lost interest when he started talking about his .vimrc file and the plugins he used. It seems arcane to have to have these cryptic settings, whose functions aren't immediately obvious, and write them to a file. I understand that part of the VIM philosophy is that it's almost like a language, or that it's like programming your text, but configuration is just something that you (ideally) set once, and then forget about. Even if I do learn what "nnoremap <leader>ft Vatzf", if I need to set up my environment again, I'll likely forget what it is and why I needed it in the first place. And even if I configure VIM to have the things I want (for example, NERDtree for project navigation), it'll never look or feel as intuitive as having a graphical interface.
So it seems when people talk about VIM, it seems that they're really talking about two things: the control scheme (keybindings) and the editor itself (the environment).
Being an android developer, I use eclipse. I use the "Vrapper" plugin, which gives me vim keybindings in the eclipse editor. I love it. It gives me the vim navigation that I know and love, but the environment and tools provided by Eclipse. I think this is how it should be - the environment of the editor is best handled separately, and although you can add a ton of plugins and configure the crap out of VIM to turn it into an IDE, it'll never really be a proper IDE.
This is why I'm still looking for an ideal lightweight text editor/IDE. My ideal for linux would be Geany, but with Vim keybindings. I discovered Vico yesterday, which looks interesting, but is OSX only at the moment. Might be what I'm looking for, but we'll see.
Try Sublime Text 2 for a lightweight editor with Vi keybindings. It's not Vim but it's quite powerful in its own right and is cross-platform.
With some experience and the right mindset, Vim's language becomes second nature and a mapping like yours is very easy to understand.
The thing is that too many people, me included at the beginning, follow the "learn -> customize" path in the wrong order: "customize -> learn"; often because of articles like this. This lead to a non-productive mix of plugin-addiction and mappings-dependance that's rather obviously counter-productive.
The ideal path would be to first learn how to use plain Vim then use this knowledge to customize it. This path leads to a short .vimrc and a lightweight .vim directory while the other leads to a miles-long arcane .vimrc and a bloated .vim directory.
You can do a lot more in vim without plugins than with most text editors. In fact, I'd say that was one of it's major advantages over the competition. Relying too much on plugins and configuration makes things hard when you're switching machines or using shared logins a lot.
Comments
I'm a bit torn. I love the controls in vim, the way you navigate and manipulate text is a brilliant system. It makes it more efficient and more "fun".
However, I really don't like the configuration system for vim. Reading the article above, I lost interest when he started talking about his .vimrc file and the plugins he used. It seems arcane to have to have these cryptic settings, whose functions aren't immediately obvious, and write them to a file. I understand that part of the VIM philosophy is that it's almost like a language, or that it's like programming your text, but configuration is just something that you (ideally) set once, and then forget about. Even if I do learn what "nnoremap <leader>ft Vatzf", if I need to set up my environment again, I'll likely forget what it is and why I needed it in the first place. And even if I configure VIM to have the things I want (for example, NERDtree for project navigation), it'll never look or feel as intuitive as having a graphical interface.
So it seems when people talk about VIM, it seems that they're really talking about two things: the control scheme (keybindings) and the editor itself (the environment).
Being an android developer, I use eclipse. I use the "Vrapper" plugin, which gives me vim keybindings in the eclipse editor. I love it. It gives me the vim navigation that I know and love, but the environment and tools provided by Eclipse. I think this is how it should be - the environment of the editor is best handled separately, and although you can add a ton of plugins and configure the crap out of VIM to turn it into an IDE, it'll never really be a proper IDE.
This is why I'm still looking for an ideal lightweight text editor/IDE. My ideal for linux would be Geany, but with Vim keybindings. I discovered Vico yesterday, which looks interesting, but is OSX only at the moment. Might be what I'm looking for, but we'll see.
Try Sublime Text 2 for a lightweight editor with Vi keybindings. It's not Vim but it's quite powerful in its own right and is cross-platform.
With some experience and the right mindset, Vim's language becomes second nature and a mapping like yours is very easy to understand.
The thing is that too many people, me included at the beginning, follow the "learn -> customize" path in the wrong order: "customize -> learn"; often because of articles like this. This lead to a non-productive mix of plugin-addiction and mappings-dependance that's rather obviously counter-productive.
The ideal path would be to first learn how to use plain Vim then use this knowledge to customize it. This path leads to a short .vimrc and a lightweight .vim directory while the other leads to a miles-long arcane .vimrc and a bloated .vim directory.
You can do a lot more in vim without plugins than with most text editors. In fact, I'd say that was one of it's major advantages over the competition. Relying too much on plugins and configuration makes things hard when you're switching machines or using shared logins a lot.