Re: Vim and You

[frostman]

I've used vim on a wide variety of UNIX derivatives, on Windows, and on the Mac, and I look forward to using it on the iPhone (pocket Mac?).

I think of it as my "first editor" even though I know that can't be true. I must have used something else when failing to learn Pascal on an Amiga, and I must have used pico during the years I used pine, and when I wrote my C64 Super BASIC and played around with Logo and assembly on the //c I must have used a non-vim.

But at least in my "growed-up life" vi(m) claims some sort of historical primacy. It remains my editor of first resort on unfamiliar systems and on the various things I access by ssh.

To be perfectly honest my devotion is probably fueled by simple muscle memory. I can :wq! in a half-second in my sleep, and routinely do, causing all sorts of trouble. If nearly every system had the dreaded emacs installed and not vi(m) ("emacs" - it even sounds like a monster!) then I'd probably suck it up and learn ed.

Nowadays I find myself even more slavishly devoted to TextMate, since I'm usually on a Mac (poor BB, I knew thee well, dinosaur, Darwinian road kill, alas...). For Windows there's a clone called "E" and all the other hyper-powerful little visual editors, not least of them the marvelously quirky UltraEdit, with which I pounded out about four years of code.

But there's one thing vim does better than any of them, and about which I actually care quite a lot, and that's syntax highlighting.

Vim's Perl syntax highlighting is the gold standard, the reference. It's so good I use it for "pretty-printing" out of TextMate. I have a back-burnered project to make a toolchain of TextMate -> vim -> XHTML+CSS, just because.

So, at long last, as much as I love vim for other things, Perl syntax highlighting is the one thing it does that I would mourn, tearfully, if it disappeared from the world, and I would know I was right and not just being a sissy.