Painters have paintbrushes, writers have pens, and coders have…well, text editors. Real life software hackery is less glamorous than what Hollywood would believe, but an experienced developer work a set of familiar tools is still pretty awe-inspiring.
The best editors are full of keyboard shortcuts, customizable, and highly extensible. At the various places I worked, the tools ranged from Textmate to Eclipse to Visual Studio to RubyMine, but there was always a group that insisted on the old-school: vim and emacs always worked, as long as there was a compiler and shell around. The speed that they were able to move around and edit files made up for the lack of language-specific features.
So, partially out of curiosity and partially out of necessity, I’m making myself learn vim. I don’t think it’s as extensible as emacs, and it seems harder to get started{{1}}, but from what I’ve seen the raw text editing capabilities are awesome, and of course it’s the preferred editor for non-Windows servers.
As my colleague Jack says, I’ll “have a 3-foot beard in NO TIME”.
[[1]]At least, there seem to be a lot more “get started with vim, slowly tutorials out there.[[1]]
Simplicity in computing. A few months back, with Evernote spiraling downwards — both in terms of product offering and company — I had tried to switch over to Microsoft’s OneNote app. Out of all the Evernote alternatives, OneNote seemed to …
How do you build the successor to the perfect keyboard? Fortunately, we don’t have to answer that question, as the OG Kinesis Advantage keyboard was a great, but far-from-perfect keyboard. Released back in 2002, the original Kinesis Advantage was a …
Can you tell us which tutorial are you following?
I’m going through the one that I linked (http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/); I’ve also had some luck with this one: http://www.openvim.com/tutorial.html. Other than that, I hope to just bug my coworkers a lot. =)