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I read this, spent most of the day struggling with Vim and then went back to Textmate defeated. I still can't understand why I should move to Vim/Emacs when I s

• there 18y ago
  then don't. use whatever you're productive in, not what some silly weblog entry says you should.
• Hexstream 18y ago
  Emacs and Vim have ridiculous learning curves. Their practitioners wouldn't be so fanatic about them if anyone could unlock their powers in a day. However if you're ready to make a real commitment to learning it, you might get a great return on investment down the line. Learning about all the great programmers who favorite those editors might give you enough faith to give it a serious try.
  • kuvkir 18y ago
    I wouldn't say Vim has a ridiculous learning curve, it took me about 5 minutes to read through vimtutor and get started with vim. However, being a vim adept for a long time hasn't stopped me from switching to textmate when it came to developing rails apps. ;)
  • gord 18y ago
    disclaimer - Im a daily vim user. I think the {derivative of the} learning curve has a long tail.. I keep finding new cool things I can do with it, I guess emacs is the same, or even more so as you can start hacking lisp... I recommend printing out a cheat sheet with the most common commands - you can start small and get work done. Things like <esc> :E for browsing files is handy and youll forget them at first. I map a hotkey for :bn :bp so I can flick through the open buffers. Good tuts on the web. It packs a punch. oh, on ubuntu youll need to install vim-full sudo apt-get install vim-full .. thats annoying, but you'll be crippled without it.