Sunday, August 09, 2009

The internet is good for Vim

I think Vim is a great text editor and one that's well worth learning. But it's certainly a bit of effort to learn all the commands and get used to working in different modes. A lot of people seem to be put off by that initial frustration.

You're editing a file and there'll be something, often fairly simple, that you want to do but don't know how. And while the Vim help is quite good it can be hard to find info on the specific thing you want to do, so it’s easy to get stuck. At least that was the situation 10-15 years ago. But these days you can just put details of what you’re trying to do into Google and you’ll likely get a good answer. And the net contains a number of Vim cheatsheets.

Of all the editors, Vim probably has the largest initial hump to get over before getting to proficiency, but also one of the largest payoffs for doing so, and the internet is making it a lot easier to get over that hump. And for that reason we might see a resurgence in its use.

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