Making the Switch to V.I.M.

This weekend I needed to do some training with VIM (vi Improved – text editor), most of the programmers at my job use Nano(I believe) but the Developers seem to use VIM, so I began to find out the reason and what was all fuss about.

So after using Nano for the last 10 months I’d become pretty competent and it’s ease of use, fast editing, and other features made it great to use. But it wasn’t as great as I thought it was. But I didn’t find this out until after I start to use VIM.

I went scouring the internet for about 3-4 hours in search for a quick start guide, feature guide, and anything else VIM related; if I was going to use it I needed to immerse myself in it quickly, learning enough to replace nano and then some was the plan, admittedly I didn’t think I would learn as fast as it’s coming to me. In fact in about 1 hour I replaced a lot of Nano’s inefficiencies with Vim’s powerful features.

After scouring I became saturated in the fact that Vim is not just a replacement text editor, it is not only a huge switch it was a huge plus at what I could do. Here are a list of features I loved about Vim.

UNDO – you can undo your edits (impossible in nano w/o exiting the file)

MODE BASED – depending on what you want to do you use the specific mode to suit your needs. Ranging from Normal, Visual, Edit, Command, and a couple of others I haven’t ventured too, VIM aims to be your all in one text-editor monster.

Customization – You can customize Vim like you can customize a blank sheet of paper with a pencil, adding line numbers, color code, plugins, and a range of efficiencies that  isn’t offered anywhere else. VIM rocks.

Speed – it seems faster, more responsive, and just plain efficient.

Overall this tool, language, lifestyle is a great addition to anyone’s toolset. My goal for this week is to use Vim whenever I need to ssh into my server and edit files. I will be immersing myself into it’s vast amount of features. Lets hope I don’t get lost

Use Vim because it rocks!