Hermes

When I was at the Vim London meetup, one of the talks announced Hermes (GitHub: New-Bamboo / Hermes). This is a Vim, tmux, iTerm 2 environment for writing Ruby and JavaScript. The developers behind the project work for New-Bamboo, which is a company that specialises in Ruby web development.

Hermes is basically an installer based around manifest files, which are lists of either Homebrew dependencies or the dotfiles used by the project. The installer backs up existing dotfiles that would otherwise be overwritten.

As an example of the bundled dotfiles, the Hermes tmux.conf file has Vim mappings configured:

unbind h
bind h select-pane -L
unbind j
bind j select-pane -D
unbind k
bind k select-pane -U
unbind l
bind l select-pane -R

As for Vim plugins, it includes NERDTree, ack.vim, ctrlp.vim, Powerline, and some of Tim Pope’s plugins that are popular within the Ruby community. Pathogen is used to manage plugins.

If you’re writing Ruby projects on a Mac, then Hermes offers quick way to get started with console-based Vim development.