Do You Speak Vim?
December 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Every so often I get on a kick to change the text editors I use. While I have tried most of them, Emacs, Notepad ++ and a many others, the one I keep coming back to is Vim. For most of you, this discussion is as boring as watching paint dry. However, for some geeks who spend a lot of time writing or editing code or even just plain text files the choice of text editors is a big deal.
I don’t write a lot of code, but I do write a lot of text. The longer I have been using computers, and the more versions of word processors I have seen come and go, the more convinced I become of the value and beauty of plain text. A good example of this is found in a recent upgrade of Microsoft Office at work. We went from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and every since, I’ve gotten complaints from the few souls left on our network that are stuck on 2003 that they can’t open the new 2007 file format.
I don’t seem to have that problem with plain text. The things I write now, I want to be able to open in 10 or even 20 years from now. I mean, who has a copy of Word Perfect 5.1 to open all those old documents you created nearly 20 years ago.
There is also a subtle beauty in working with plain text. Vim, for all my experiments with other text editors, is the best. I don’t want to start a Emacs vs. Vi flame war but that’s my opinion. If you want to play with Vim, be warned there is a steeper learning curve than with some other programs but if you stick with it, I believe you’ll find it worth the effort. Who knows, you might even be convinced of the beauty of plain text.
