I simply do not understand why anyone would like TextMate if they knew how to use Vim, emacs, or even Visual Studio. Some of my reasons are at http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2008/03/textmate-is-worst-program-that-people.html.

Instead of yy, you can type Y.

rails.vim is awesome, but don’t feel you have to jump into it right away. But when you do, entering :AS to open the spec for the current file in a split window will be fun (I contributed a bit to this functionality).

I didn’t know about dap until about six months ago. I wrote my own version of vi in 1985, and I would still learn new capabilities months later.

Ctrl-W Ctrl-^ opens the prior file you were editing in a split window.

You can set marks in other files by using capital letters: mA, e.g.

Learning one or two commands a day is absolutely the best way to learn Vim.

TextMate’s Cmd-T is awesome, but check out Jamis’s Vim equivalent.

I use q for macros, so to start, I just type qq. After you’ve run a macro with @q, you can hit @@ to run it again. If you want to run it 200 times (e.g., on the rest of the file), type 200@@.

I’m about to start work at a company where they pair program all the time, so I’m going to have to give up Vim, unfortunately. They use RubyMine, which has lots and lots of useful Ruby/Rails features out of the box. No vi emulation mode, though.

While CTRL+C does work most of the time, it’s not EXACTLY like ESC because all it actually commands the editor is to “leave the INSERT mode”. This is no problem while editing plain text but if you have some fancy plug-ins using the “InsertLeave” event, you will find soon enough that CTRL+C does not trigger them.

CTRL+[ is ESC.

David is also wrong about Mac OS X not letting you remap CapsLock to Ctrl. It might have been true once but at least since Leopard (haven’t checked older versions) you’re able to choose your mapping right in the Keyboard Preferences pane.

And one more thing, the modal nature of Vim comes in handy when you realize it remembers all your modal commands and for the crazy combo you did 5 minutes ago, all you have to do is simply recall it using the Up key while in edit mode. Moreover, typing a bit of the command’s beginning filters the history and I use this feature quite often.

In my case, I prefer to let my tiling window manager caring about windows. So I only want to use both on terminal mode.

I love Vim but I have lot of difficulties with the dual mode and always forget to switch from one to the other … Emacs key binding does not feel so alright to me.

I wish I found the perfect editor one day.

You can use ^W in insert mode

:help i_^W

–Honolulu hacker. kenglish

Textmate and such are for people who want to use the defaults of their editor, so they adapt to the editor’s way of doing things. Emacs on the other hand is for people who want their editor to adapt to their needs.

These are two schools of philosophy really.

BTW, complex extensions are also big pluses for Eamcs. E.g, if you don’t know orgmode I suggest checking it out. It’d keep me with Emacs even if I wanted to leave which I don’t:

http://orgmode.org/

Do you mind sharing your .vimrc file? And what plugins do you use?

I am also new to Vim.

Thanks!

I think your point about the editor wars is right on though, personal preference should never be a substitute for honest inquiry.

Anyway, I was just posting to say thanks, you’ve inspired me to take a closer look at Vim.

I routinely tease my emacs-using colleagues (and they me) for their editor choice — but I will also express admiration for some of the tools they have. I respect those who have mastered it. I’ve tried to learn Emacs several times, and failed miserably each time.

Which is odd, really, considering that I had used microemacs as my primary editor for awhile. (Of course, that was before I had invested thousands of hours playing Rogue, Larn, and Nethack.)

As for escape being hard to reach… I’ve never found it so. It’s at the corner of the keyboard, and is thus the easiest non-home-row key to find and hit without looking. Plus, you can type control-open-square-bracket “^[” if that’s easier for you.

And finally, if you like to use IDEs and end up in Java-land, then you should know that NetBeans can use the jVi plugin to acquire much of the vi(m) goodness, which makes the IDE a LOT more palatable to touch-typists.