brite fisher

Making the Switch to VIM

Well, after a couple years of using Textmate (and liking it for the most part) I've decided to change editors and have happily been using VIM for the last couple weeks. Why VIM? Nothing in particular stands out really. One of my co-workers is a big fan of it, I have to use it once and awhile when on the servers and emacs seemed to be a big pain in the ass :). Here's a few of the plugins I've installed that helped make me feel more at home in VIM: "NERDTree":http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658 This plugin gives you a project tree that you can use to navigate your project tree. I also mapped the ` key to toggle the tree making it super easy to open and close. "fuzzy finder":http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984 and "fuzzy finder textmate":http://github.com/jamis/fuzzyfinder_textmate These two plugins give the same functionality as cmd-t in Textmate, letting you quickly open files in the project. I mapped this to ,+t and ,+r to refresh the list. "rails vim":http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1567 This gives a while pile of shortcuts and helpers for working with rails. "snipMate":http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540 Just like it sounds, this plugin gives you snippets much like Textmate has. Put that together with "the snippets":http://github.com/scrooloose/snipmate-snippets from scrooloose (Martin Grenfell) and we have access to lots of cool shortcuts. These are the main plugins I added. I also included a shortcut to use ACK for search and a number of other little scripts and shortcuts to make myself more productive. I've got the whole set of "config files":http://github.com/jduff/vimfiles up on github so you can use it, fork it, change it all you want.