Vim is my text editor of choice. If you find it hard
to understand why, here are some reasons:
- Separate modes for insertion/manipulation and command.
This makes operations composable, and to some extent, makes it possible to statically
validate command sequences. eg. if ce changes the word under the cursor and Ft jumps to the
last occurrence of the character 't', then c3Fte changes the word 3 t's before the cursor.
- It's ergonomic
Some editors force your fingers into fairly inconvenient rotations/tortions
for the most frequent operations. Vim lets you do everything with the standard
ASCII keyset (you won't ever find yourself doing a Ctrl-Alt-x-j-r-4-!
I used to think I had a fairly extensive collection of tips and tricks in
Vim, but then the other day, I saw
David Rayner's collection
and found that I was mistaken. This is a must-peruse for any Vim user.
I've put up Some simple scripts I've written at vim.org.
Some other scripts I depend on are:
engspchk - The best spell-checking plugin around
OMLET by David Baelde - Is a must have if you code in Caml
WOWCamldebug Is an excellent VIM based GUI for ocamldebug
Mail mutt alias by Luc Hermitte
Vim Spell by Mathieu Clabaut - which is amazing
New! After trying a number of spell-check packages, I've come to the conclusion
that engspchk is the best. It has
dictionaries for many languages and is very convenient to use. Also, it works with VIM 6.3+, which
does not seem to be the case for Mathieu Clabaut's Vim Spell as of 7.6.2005.
To increase the font size in VIM, you might need to specify the font you
want to use. It appears that VIM only supports monospace fonts (fonts in which
characters have a fixed size. This means that you can only pick fonts that have "mono" in them if you don't want the text to look ugly.