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Most developers know the basics of VIM, enough to edit a conf file, but most stay there, unaware of the power and beauty of vim. One of my developers has expressed desire to abandon the bloated GUI ways of eclipse and discover VIM. I have been using VIM for such a long time I forgot how difficult that transition is. Here are some resources and approaches to help you learn vim.
Today I discovered snipMate, and I feel like I have finally found the holy grail. SnipMate plays well with supertab and autocompletion. It provides pretty much all the beloved snippet features of TextMate, it even has a nearly identical syntax to TextMate. If you’re not using the snipMate plugin for vim yet you need to be.
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The NERD Commenter is an indispensable tool when programming in VIM. It understands like a zillion different file types and properly comments each. It can handle single line, multi line, partial line commenting as well as nesting. If you're programming in VIM you really should be using it.
It is simple enough to use. Most commands are mapped to ,c[character]. The command you are probably going to use the most is ,c<space> which intelligently toggles a comment on or off.
You can find the plugin at The NERD Commenter.
One of the things that makes vim great is that it can be extended through plugins. There are plugins for more than you would expect. I have gathered together the 15 best plugins. I also include a tarball which when extracted in your home directory will setup my vim environment with all the plugins and configuration.
Steve Francia is a technology and business executive, developer and innovator, currently serving as VP of Engineering at the OpenSky Project.
He has held positions at all levels including Developer, Sys Admin, DBA, Lead Developer, Architect, VP, CTO, COO and CIO.
The author of spf13.com, a blog on development, leadership and social media which is syndicated on All Top and has been featured in prominent industry publications including CIO Magazine.
A key contributor to and founding developer of the Zoop Framework, a popular framework for PHP and is big on contributing to the open source community.
When not working, developing or blogging Steve can be found spending time with his family, working on his home or playing sports.
[The opinions expressed here are mine alone, and not those of my employer.]
