Pros and Cons of Vim

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I am not going to write a "review" on Vim, because it is 50 years
old.


This is going to be the things I like, the things I dont like, and
the things that are still giving me trouble.

Pros:

  •  I can carry over many of the same scripts and snippets I used with TextMate, with minimal changes. This was my biggest worry - would I get super slow without all of my little tricks?
  • The navigation keys (hjkl) are second nature. This is 100% thanks to Google - they use them for all of they applications, so moving to vim means I get to keep those habits.
  • Editing text is so much faster, and the gap increases the more you edit.
  • Fullscreen and vertically split buffers: heaven

Cons:

  • It is a bitch to keep my environments in check. I use Git for all my .dotfiles, which means if I change something on the work iMac, I need to remember to do a 'git pull' on my MacBook.
  • I still have a TON of work to do in my .vimrc file. I need to learn what all is available, and then work on it further. I know that there are some things that annoy me about vim that could be changed with a few 'lets' or 'sets'
  • There are fewer snippets out there for what I do. I am now one of the main maintainers for anything CodeIgniter related for vim, and I have a feeling I may be doing the same for WordPress very soon.


Things that are still giving me trouble

Learning commands. There are just so damn many, that it is hard to know what to focus on. I try to learn a new one a day, but it is a big hassle to stop what I am doing and look up if vim has a smarter way to do that. I have been using vim as my sole editor for the last 3 weeks now, and overall I am loving it. Its fast, nice with memory, and does what I need it to. I still have a few more kinks to work out, but I can see why it has stood the test of time. TextMate 2, take you time.