Saturday, June 28, 2014

Why I can't stop using Vim

In 1992 or 1993, my brother-in-law hired me to help him with some maintenance on a software system he had written for a customer. It ran on SCO Xenix.

"Hey, Bro, why doesn't 'EDIT' work on this computer?" I was a DOS rookie back in those early days, having just started my major in Computer Science.

"Um, there's no EDIT command on Xenix. Let me introduce you to vi. You use hjkl to move around, plus a few other keystrokes. Once you get used to it, it's not that bad." I swear he had a sly grin on his face as he said that, but he was serious. Vi was what I was going to have to use. Only now, as I write this, do I recall that he was, at that time, working in Windows with a shiny graphical editor. Oh, well, he was the boss, after all.

Anyway, I learned to move around pretty quickly, hitting 'i' to start typing, and 'Esc' to move around again. I wouldn't say I was a wizard, but I got the work done. We would tap away on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings in our work sessions, while our wives played Super Mario Brothers out in the front room. Good times. I really miss it sometimes.

That was the side job. The day job kept me programming on OS/2 and some Windows. The stock editor on OS/2 was a decent editor - you typed text, and it saved it just fine. I cranked out many, many lines of code using that editor.

We're programmers. Editing text is the very essence of what we do. We get excited about these sorts of things.

Fast forward to 1997. My brother-in-law once again helped me get my foot in the door at a small telecommunications company in Phoenix. My first workstation was a Sun SPARCstation 20, running Solaris. Cool, I thought, I can use vi to get going. But by now, everyone was using UltraEdit on their Windows machines. I didn't have one of those, but I really needed the productivity boost of a better editor. A little Yahoo searching turned up some vi clone called Vim. There was a new release of it, version 5, and it came with syntax highlighting! Take that, UltraEdit!

This is getting long... Let's just say, I used Vim for all my editing on that SPARC station. And when I finally got a Windows PC, I was elated to find that there was a Windows version of Vim, with a GUI and everything!

Vim and I have had a bit of a fickle relationship over the years. Although it does an amazing job helping you type text, it's not flashy, and it's not perfect, and because of those imperfections, I strayed from time to time, looking for something to fix those imperfections, and still give me the second-nature editing reflexes I had come to enjoy from Vim.

Here's a list of the things that have caused me to look beyond Vim.
  • viml - Vim's built in scripting language is tedious to work in. Some folks have done some amazing things with it, but, try as I have, I can't get myself to enjoy it.
  • Glossy finish - I admit, I'm guilty of a little editor envy when I see some of the prettier interfaces out there, especially these days.
  • Emacs's Org Mode - this is such a killer emacs app. Others have tried to replicate it for Vim. Someday.
  • Context-aware code completion - OmniComplete provides a decent framework, but nobody has really matched the power of Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Xcode.

Yes, I have strayed, and flirted with many other editors...

  • JEdit (Ugh, looks like a Java Swing App, and too much clutter everywhere)
  • Emacs (Love the features and the eLISP, but can't tolerate the myriad key chords needed to navigate around my files.)
  • Emacs + Evil Mode (Evil mode is REALLY good. The only thing that made me frown was poor code navigation via ETAGS.)
  • J (A tiny little Java based editor, built around ABCLisp from Armed Bear. I really loved this editor, but it fell behind in features, and I needed more power.) EDIT: This editor is still alive (somewhat) on github: https://github.com/kevinkrouse/j/tree/master/j. Thanks to bokchoi on ihackernews.com for the link.
  • Programmers Notepad (Decent editor, but not enough features).
  • Editra (a Python/WxWindows based editor, with Vi emulation. But it also lacked things like smart indent and other features I have come to take for granted.)
  • Notepad++ (A very respectable editor. Tons of features. But for some reason, I just don't enjoy using it. Maybe it's all the visual clutter around the borders of the screen?)
  • Visual SlickEdit (I actually bought a license for this once, about a decade ago. I liked using it, but I could only afford one platform, and there are lots of free editors that do most of the same things. With Vim in my toolbox, I'll never pay $300 to edit text.)
  • TextMate (When on a Mac, it had to be tried. The free TextMate 2 is a great editor, and I flirted with this one the longest. Were it not for the things I'm about to mention below, I'd be using this editor as much as possible.)
  • A whole slew of respected MacOS based editors: Kod, Smultron, SublimeText, TextWrangler, etc.

Here's where they all fell short, and what took me back to Vim every time...
  • hjkl for navigation
  • / for searching (really, no other editor has made it this simple)
  • m to bookmark a spot, ' to hop back to it
  • and ctags
  • q to record a macro; @ to execute it again
  • 1G to go to the top of the file, G to go to the bottom
  • ^, $ to go to the front, or end, of a line.
  • Text Objects! Holy cow, if you're a Vim user and you're not using these, you're missing something special.
  • Platform ubiquity. (Mac, Linux, Windows - Vim works great on all the platforms I use day in and day out.)

What it boils down to, really, is that the above keys have become a part of me. They are so ingrained in my brain and reflexes, that I think of what I want done in the text and my hands just naturally do it for me. It's like drinking water. I don't have to think about how to go about bringing the cup to my mouth and tipping it just right. I just do it, and keep going on about my business.

THAT's what keeps me coming back to vim.

Yes, it still has its imperfections. I end up using IDE's for a large part of the work I do, and they provide a lot of what I wish vim would do better. But there are some plugins that bring the above features into those environments...

For Eclipse, I use the Vrapper plugin. Works great!

For Xcode, I have used XVim. It's not perfect, and crashes Xcode in a couple of situations. But it's getting better, and is actively developed.

As a special bonus for having read my lengthy article all the way to the bottom. Here's a chunk of my .vimrc that allows me to have nested "project" settings in my directory tree...
" Search for any .vimsettings files in the path to the file.
" Source them if you find them.
function! ApplyLocalSettings(dirname)
    " Don't try to walk a remote directory tree -- takes too long, too many
    " what if's
    let l:netrwProtocol = strpart(a:dirname, 0, stridx(a:dirname, "://"))
    if l:netrwProtocol != ""
        return
    endif

    " Convert windows paths to unix style (they still work)
    let l:curDir = substitute(a:dirname, "", "/", "g")
    let l:parentDir = strpart(l:curDir, 0, strridx(l:curDir, "/"))
    if isdirectory(l:parentDir)
        call ApplyLocalSettings(l:parentDir)
    endif

    " Now walk back up the path and source .vimsettings as you find them. This
    " way child directories can 'inherit' from their parents
    let l:settingsFile = a:dirname . "/.vimsettings"
    if filereadable(l:settingsFile)
        exec ":source " . l:settingsFile
    endif
endfunction
autocmd! BufEnter * call ApplyLocalSettings(expand("<afile>:p:h"))

I posted it to Reddit a couple of years ago, and the feedback was overall positive. There were a few good ideas posted in the comments, so here's the link.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear your feedback below.

EDIT: spelling corrections; added links to other editors