Vim.

I guess you can say things are getting a little serious now.

“How do you know someone is a Vim user?”

“They’ll tell you”

There something so elitist about Vim that I just couldn’t see past. Anyone who used it just had to mention they used it and for the longest time I never really understood why. I’m still somewhat convinced that some use it because it comes with a status. A Vim user is a real hardcore coder or something to that effect.

The truth is, I’ve tried several times to make the switch to Vim, just to see if it really is as good as people make it out to be. At least twice a year for the past four years I have tried to make the switch and it really just hasn’t struck gold for me.

Now I’m at it again.

A little history.

My first IDE/editor was Macromedia Homesite. I lived off a pirated serial number for a good while. I probably only used 20% of its overall functionality, but it stuck around for a while.

I then moved onto Dreamweaver and got to know a little more about IDEs and what they could offer. Dreamweaver caught a lot of slack for it’s WYSIWYG functionality, but I never really ever used it. Autocomplete was my friend, as was the built in FTP functionality allowing me to just jockey right on the live server (I didn’t really use version control at this point). When I was forced into using SVN, there was built in stuff for that too.

When I joined SapientNitro in 2010 I got my first Mac and was introduced to textmate. It didn’t have as many windows as Dreamweaver, and didn’t appear to have as many built-in features, but after a week, I dug it’s simplicity. Over about a year I used Textmate and got into the whole mantra of small sharp tools. I got used to the large editor area, the darker color scheme that was a whole bunch easier on my eyes and there was a whole bunch of third party plugins that made my development workflow smoother.

I think I first heard about Sublime text on some tutorial site, it was like net-tuts, codeschool or something like that, but it was / still is compared to Textmate but with an ever growing eco-system for plugins and a momentum for the core software that Textmate just didn’t have. I tried it, liked it and have owned it ever since.

Along the way I have tried other editors.

I tried Webstorm and was put off by all the setup for a project. The built-in tools sounded nice, but they really didn’t seem to compensate for the fact that I had to deal with just so much going on in my direct vision.

I tried Githubs Atom editor and found it slow and clunky. I couldn’t care less about it’s ‘Hackability’, when scrolling through a few hundred lines of code was sketchy like one of those infinite scrolling sites. I’ve not tried it in its recent releases and see many people using it, but it’s really not tearing me away from Sublime yet.

I tried Visual Studio for a bit. I liked the idea of giving a fully featured IDE another try, but much like Webstorm there was just too much going on. Yeah, built in Node tools, Build tasks and Phonegap / Cordova compilation was a plus, but I’d have to work on a Windows system and I just don’t do that anymore unless I want to play some games. Sorry. Strictly on a Mac most of the time or I jump to a Arch box occasionally at home.

Coming back

So here we are. I am still very much a lover of Sublime, have been a happy customer for years. I have a color scheme I like, I have a bunch of snippets and I have memory muscle for my most used shortcuts. So why the change.

About 4 months ago I started getting this shooting pain running from the palm of my hand down my arm to my elbow. I didn’t even consider that this might be RSI, because it felt way more painful that I imagined that RSI was, but after talking about it with people whom had suffered with it before, all the signs pointed to RSI. I had tried various ergonomic mice before but I decided that maybe it was best that I not try to use the mouse as much.

Keyboard navigation on some websites suck — there’s probably an entire set of blog posts on how maybe we should start trying to fix this — but I manage to get by with the help of some Chrome extensions and general A11Y methods.

General OS stuff is sorted with the Aid of Spectacle window manager and Alfred.

Now time for one of the places where I spend a good majority of my time, Sublime. There is Vintage mode and there is a plugin called Vintageous, but after trying these I just couldn’t get the hang of them and always found myself drifting back to using a mouse. So I decided that I should give Vim a good hard look and real effort to get along with it.

So that’s why I’m trying Vim. Not because its cool or hip or makes me a l337Hax0rz, but because my fucking hand hurts. A lot. I guess I am hoping that with minimal movement of my hands daily that they will get better. I’ll get myself a nicer keyboard rather than writing on something flat and I’ll be able to do everything with just as much ease without needing a mouse.

So far I have Vim up and running with Pathogen and Nerdtree. I went through various of the top posts in /r/vim in order to gather the best starting out guide, plenty of opinions on Vundle or Pathogen, and I just went with Pathogen because that seemed to get more positive votes. I know that Vim has a built in file explorer but every guide I look at seems to recommend Nerdtree, so Im going with it.

So here I am. Ready to dive into life with Vim. By the time I get back to work on the 5th I am either going to hate it or love it … or be totally indifferent. What I do know is that I really need to figure out how to change the color scheme.

EDIT : Aha! http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-tomorrow-theme-all-too-well