My Vim Setup
I’ve been using Vim as my main editor for well over two years now. After having used many editors in the past (from full blown IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans, to simpler editors like TextMate), I’ve found my perfect match. It’s ubiquity and openness are winners (I’d be disheartened right now if I was using abandonware like TextMate) and the modal editing is exactly right for how I work (I wish every text area had modal editing!)
How have I tailored my Vim setup?
- The biggest factor has been changing to use Tim Pope's Pathogen.vim plugin recently. It allows you to keep your plugins separate in their own directories, which of course makes upgrading and managing them far, far easier.
- I also rely on VimWiki. It gives me a personal wiki (I store the actual files on DropBox) which I can access almost anywhere (and importantly, cross platform), but get to edit with all of the benefits of Vim. Prior to VimWiki I had unhappily bounced around between Evernote, Yojimbo, WikidPad (years ago), VoodooPad and a bunch of other solutions. VimWiki is the best of the lot so far, though WikidPad was popular with me a few years ago.
- Probably the most used plugin would be NERDtree, a file browser. Far better than any other option out there.
- Other plugins I have, in order of most to least used: NERDcommenter, BufExplorer, Snipmate, VCSCommand, Ragtag, rails.vim and surround.vim
- I've changed my leader key to "," as I find it a little less of a stretch.
- I use the Railscasts theme, and use 256 colors.
- I use ack as my search command
- I occassionally use the Fuzzy Finder Textmate plugin.
- I admit to having a bunch of stuff in my .vimrc that I've forgotten about. Looks like useful stuff though, so I can't bring myself to remove them!
