Switching to Vim

Looking back, I realise that I’ve gone through a number of phases in my programming career, and along with each phase, there seems to occur a change in my choice of editor…

Early on, my editor of choice was Emacs, as I studied various languages (Modula2, Smalltalk, C and others) on Unix, but I soon migrated over to become a DOS developer and after spending a couple of years in the Borland Brief DOS editor I switched to Windows, Visual C++ (1.5), eventually to become Visual Studio, and thats where I stayed for many, many years.

About 10 years ago, I made a gradual switch from a C++ Windows developer to a javascript and AJAX Web developer (although we called it DHTML back then) but I continued to work in Visual Studio. Then 4 or 5 years ago I embraced Ruby and Linux, and for the first time in many years I was no longer using any Microsoft technologies… it had became time to say a fond farewell to Visual Studio…

… but it didn’t happen overnight. I stayed in Windows and turned to UltraEdit as a comfortable alternative to VS, editing files on a samba share from a linux environment inside a VirtualBox. But over time, I found myself spending more time inside the Linux VirtualBox than in Windows. So why not cut out the middle man and just work directly in Linux?

Well, thats just what I’m going to do! starting with the Vim editor. I’ll let you know how it goes over the next few days…