One of the seemingly common threads I am seeing is that having vim available across platforms is an advantage to some. That certainly has value. I can't reall

One of the seemingly common threads I am seeing is that having vim available across platforms is an advantage to some. That certainly has value. I can't really comment on the rest of your excellent post until I try some of these things out. I intend to spend some time with vim this weekend, try out some of the ideas presented in this thread and see what I can learn. I can comment on this: "And given the number of studies that show that a single interruption to a coder can result in a half-hour delay whilst he rebuilds his mental stack, that makes Vim a tool that can save you hours of productive time every single week." I've been programming since I was ten years old. I have well over twenty years of experience in the field, across multiple platforms, tools and languages. I started out with machine language. Not assembler, actually typing in hex instruction codes into a keypad. Back then, I used that approach a number of times to bootstrap a Forth system onto a newly built computer board (something like a 6502 board). One of the first things you do after that is write an editor (in Forth) so you can start moving faster. I have to say that in all of this time I have never had an editor get in the way of the programming task to such an extent that it can be considered an interruption. Interruptions that disrupt the mental stack you refer to are very real and they suck, but, in my experience, the text editor is never the issue. Again, thanks for your valuable input. I'll spend some time absorbing it over the weekend. I need to get a project out first. Damn priorities!