- #Macvim green extra characters how to#
- #Macvim green extra characters plus#
- #Macvim green extra characters windows#
doesn't really appeal to me because I'm too visual when I'm editing code. > On top of that the whole "language of editing" and combining noun,verb,adjective commands, etc. Mainly I focus on mastering core vim and I do with reasonable confidence that the investment I'm making now will pay dividends 10, 20 and 30 years from now. Now it's true that I will tweak my config and go and seek out some plugins to enhance my core workflows slowly over time, but that's just the icing on the cake. The main disadvantage is that vim really can't compete with IDEs for boilerplate-heavy verbose languages like Java, but I'm not particularly interested in learning languages like that.
It lowers the barrier for learning new languages, or even switching platforms (I like OS X now, but I don't want to be locked in forever when Apple dials up the consumerification to 12). It's true an IDE or the right modern editor might have things set up with nice defaults for x or y language, but pick five editing tasks at random and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better editor out of the box than vim.īeing able to competently edit any file out of the box on any system affords me a great mental flexibility. The vim defaults are ideal for general purpose editing. This is exactly the reason I decided to make what is probably a lifetime choice to use vim going forward. > I just can't be bothered with fiddling with config files and installing little bundles and packages for every functionality. (Small confession: I also really feel kind of bada$$ when I'm sitting behind a black terminal with green text.) Point being, vim isn't for everyone, but using vim doesn't have to be this big giant complicated endeavor that everyone seems to make it out to be.
#Macvim green extra characters windows#
I get distracted with too many bells and whistles and often times even just switching windows causes me to get distracted by the interwebz (.i'm a bit add), so I like the simplicity of a blank screen. I can't say I'm a very visual person though. I use it mainly because of its simplicity and terminal integration. I have a very barebones vimrc and have never installed a little bundle or package. Now I use vim for work, mostly editing c code. However, just like any other tool you use on a regular basis, those commands become muscle memory very quickly and you don't even think about it. Yeah, I initially learned vim because I didn't really have a choice (it was expected for the class that we would use vim), and I remember it being very painful in the beginning. My tips for anyone learning to use vim for everyday development would be some common tab commands: :tabnew to open a file in a new tab, :tab sball to show all currently open buffers in separate tabs, gt and gT to jump to the next/previous tabs.
Now I can maneuver my way around vim quite confidently, and although when I started off I was much slower in Vim than other editors, I now find that Vim is just as fast or faster for most tasks, particularly where I can make use of Macros.Īt the moment I still have to get my head around markers and a few other concepts, but I've definitely become proficient enough for it to be worth the effort and time invested so far.
#Macvim green extra characters how to#
Each day I tried to add one new command to my repertoire I learned about how to structure vim commands (c-change i-in w-word, etc.) and move using hjkl and the higher order movement commands like w and b. I started off just using the arrow keys to move and just using insert mode to edit text the normal way. I changed my default editor at work to be Vim, and started doing all my dev work at home through Vim.
#Macvim green extra characters plus#
I tried out both Vim and Emacs, and found Vim to be slightly easier to grok, plus my pinkie got kind of sore from holding down the Ctrl key in Emacs. I was at the stage where I'd become proficient with some command-line tools in Linux, but I didn't yet have an editor I could use fluently from the command line. I took the dive into Vim about a year ago.