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”.
- At least, there seem to be a lot more “get started with vim, slowly tutorials out there.↑
