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]]
Muscle memory is a powerful tool. I’m currently typing on a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. It’s yet another ergonomic keyboard, one those major difference – which contributes to its steeper learning curve – is in its emphasis on using the thumb …
This is Part II of me talking about keyboards. Read Part I for more context. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve converted to using the Kinesis Advantage on both my desks at work and at home. It’s definitely …
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. =)