By BoLOBOOLNE payday loans

<3 vim

Posted: August 25th, 2011 | Filed under: Programming, Tools
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I have yet to post since taking on my new position, but I’ve been doing quite a bit. I’ve had to really expand my knowledge of Linux and a few different distros. Along with that I’ve had to learn a bit about apache and mysql configuration. But that’s all been largely straightforward; just a different environment but the same basic knowledge I’ve been applying for a while.

But what I’ve really enjoyed that’s been a fairly big change from the IDEs I’ve been using is vim. Not long ago I wrote not to long ago abouthow I like minimalism from my editor and while I’d used vim here and there in small chunks (mainly for commits with git) I never really spent a lot of time in it. Moving into a world of embedded code a friend of mine who also works in embedded software highly recommended it. He pointed me to the Vim Book which gives a really solid overview of not just the tool, but the concepts and workflow behind it.

While some people might not see it as minimal, to me is. It’s *just* an editor. It can be a little convoluted and the commands don’t always seem like the most obvious choices, but the more I use it the more the system makes sense. Yesterday I even spent sometime customizing my config file. For one, I like line numbers. They don’t seem to be a general favorite of vim users, but I like it. The focus on keyboard is great. I don’t need my hands to move from the keyboard for anything. I did turn on the mouse just because I don’t like the Ctrl-Ww for switching between windows. I know it’s possible to make a custom command for that, but I’m still new and haven’t made sense of it yet.

A few of my choice settings:

" Save a lot more of a history
history=1000
" Turn on line numbers
set number
" Show the file name in the title bar
set title
" Make tabs 4 spaces and convert tabs to spaces
set tabstop=4
set expandtab
" Enable mouse usage in all settings
set mouse=a

As I get better with vim and find more things that aren’t interacting the way I like, I’m sure I’ll add to this, but this seems like a good beginners config. Vim has a bit of a learning curve, but I think it’s worth it. I think it’s a bit like git that way. Weird at first, but the more you get used to it the more awesome it is. I still only know 1% of what’s possible, but so far, I love it.

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