Switching to VIM

Hi folks,

If you follow me on twitter you’ve probably noticed the tweets on my switch from sublime to vim.

I would like to share my experiences during the switching, the reasons behind it and some of the advantages I see in my new daily workflow.

First things first

Sublime Text is a great code editor! I used it for the past 3~4 years without issues. I love its ctrl+shift+p where all options are accessible from the keyboard, I became addict to use multiple cursors and was an early adopter of package control.

I also wrote my own snippets, build systems and all the things that you would expect from a power user.

So, before get into why I switched and all that jazz, I would like to say that sublime is a great code editor and you should definitely give it a try.

That said, let’s talk about vim…

Why switching?

All started by watching a video on youtube, I never considered switching or anything, it was plain and simple curiosity about this old, clunky and weird editor.

I learned that it shouldn’t look as ugly as with the default settings, modes actually made sense (no more keyboard/mouse switching, yay!), there’s an active community writing plugins and, most importantly, it’s free and open source.

“Interesting! But I won’t switch just because of that” I thought… Yeah, right.

Since that day on, every time I had to grab the mouse to select or move around some text, something inside me yells: you are doing it wrong!… And I don’t know you, but I used to grab the mouse to move around a lot!

So, a couple of weeks later I decided to give it a try.

First impressions

In two words: NO WAY

There’s no way I could use this thing to develop anything on it. It’s too old, weird and ugly for me (yep, call me superficial, but the look is important when you stare at it all day long).

So, what you do when this happen?

Let’s the tweaking begin!

I started by tweaking my .vimrc file adding syntax highlighting, a better color scheme and all sort of small enhancements I probably grabbed from the internet.

Then I learned about plugins, so I installed pathogen to manage them and then went to ctrlp, lightline, python-mode, snipmate and vim-surround.

And that was it…

You can grab my .vimrc from here, it’s fully commented and targeted to python development.

Time to do some work

First days were a pain… Forget about cool features, just moving around using hjkl keys instead of my beloved mouse/arrows-keys and switching between modes was a challenge, not to talk about registers and the whole copy/paste thing.

But hey, after the initial shock things began to settle, I learned that hjkl are not the most efficient moves to getting around text and the whole “command nightmare” became a sort of continuous dialog with the editor (I’m not being poetic here, commands work like verbs and can be combined in interesting ways… You’ll see).

To summarize: indeed, I was doing it wrong.

By the way, this article has helped me a lot.

To this day…

I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m enjoying of some vim “super powers” when coding… In fact, I would miss many features if I were forced to use another editor.

I love the ability to run my code directly from vim (or any bash command), virtualenv support is now essential to my workflow, I love not being forced to jump between the keyboard and mouse to getting around text efficiently, macros are great and I like the general approach to commands… Even the look and feel is nice once you tweak it!

And, of course, I’m very happy to be using open and free software.

tl;dr

I switched to vim and I’m very happy with it (from a philosophical and functional point of view).

Why should you consider it?

• It is free and open source software.
• Cross-platform, it’s everywhere!
• Highly customizable.
• Efficient workflow.
• Config truly portable (1 file + plugins, no admin privileges needed).
• It’s fun, you’ll learn something new every day!