The joy of VIM editing
When vim 7 was released in May, I thought I might bite the bullet and give it a go. I had used vi before for various Linux related administration tasks, but I didn’t know much except how to save and exit or exit without saving.
I liked the thought of being able to navigate with my keyboard, using the mouse was starting to slow me down and the old RSI was starting to kick in again. I was also starting to get annoyed with the other editors out there. I couldn’t use Quanta, as I am back on a PC. Dreamweaver was okay, but the lack of auto-indention was getting to me. PHP edit was nice, but the syntax highlighting was not quite up to scratch and it was still a little dodgy, oh and I couldn’t live without regular expression search and replace. Yes, I’m fussy.
Vim rocks. While not quite the panacea I was hoping for, it does things really well. It is extremely fast, rock solid, customisable, cool and comes with uber-nerd status. My advice to everyone who has a bit of patience and is interesting in increasing the speed that they can lay down code to grab it, learn it and see how you go. Not the easiest editor on the planet, probably actually the hardest, sort of like using Blender but for text files and not 3D, but so good to use.
There are also heaps of us (vimers) out there. People have written some great articles that really help you get it. See: Efficient Editing With, one of many vim cheatsheets and Comfortable PHP editing with VIM which also references a little utility called phpm by 1 Havard Eide, most of use will remember as the geeky international student who knew most things, especially PHP, inside out, upside down and sometimes even back to front. Good to see PHP Volcano is still spewing good stuff since its inception back in 2nd year Multimedia.