I’ve always been a big fan of VSTreeExplorer since I started using Vim. Recently, I came across NerdTree, which is a much better alternative. It really makes it much easier to manage multiple tabs and sessions and has many more keybindings and mouse interactions making it the closest to the Visual Studios experience in Vim. Here’s a really good animated gif with a basic tutorial on its use:
Code editors are among the most important applications for a programmers. They are also the source of some the most heated debates online. Whether you use a full-fledged IDE like Eclipse or VisualStudios, or even a souped up text editors like Emacs or Vim, everybody has a favorite. My first IDE was Borland Turbo C and after a couple of months, “purchased” a free copy of VisualC++ (later known as VisualStudios). Finally paid for a student version when my parents found out I was really interested in programing.
VisualStudios was my main IDE until I started web development and moved to Linux. For more than a year now, I’ve been using Eclipse because their plugin system has enabled people to create really good editors for Java, PHP, Javascipt, Flex and HTML/CSS. Because it’s all in one program, the editor is really heavy and fairly bug prone. Recently, I’ve been making the switch from using Eclipse exclusively to moving most of my development to Vim.
Vim is a very good text editor and I chose it ahead of Emacs because in my opinion, the commands are simpler. Most of the common functionality of Eclipse can be found in Vim: search/replace, syntax highlighting, XDebug-ing, and much more. The debate between gui editors or vim/emacs is basically a moot point. They are just tools. Certain people’s thinking patterns are just more suited to one tool than the other. Since I use the command line for almost everything I do, using vim allows a much easier transition between editing files, writing scripts and interacting with remote hosts. For me, vim, along with all of the standard linux apps (find, grep, tail, ssh, scp, etc…), allows me to work more efficiently than any other tool so that is what I use.
Since switching to Linux, I have slowly fallen in love with Vim. I love how Vim makes it so that “your hands should never have to leave your keyboard” (Chris). The biggest drawback to using Vim, and Emacs, is that there’s a fairly steep learning curve. You pretty much have to abandon your comfort zone and force yourself to learn all of the different key bindings.
I’m very lucky in that I work with two vim gurus: Chris and Travis. Basically any question I have ever had with Vim, these two were able to answer them. But for times when they are not around I love using these sites:
This is a very short list because Vim is based on a few basic concepts and building on top of that. Once you get the basics, learning how to use buffers and macros gives you the ability to edit your files in any manner.
