Journey to Vim
Vim (a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a clone of Bill Joy’s vi editor for Unix. It was written by Bram Moolenaar based on source for a port of the Stevie editor to the Amiga and first released publicly in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. as per Wiki
Well I am a programmer. I spend like 8-10 hours of my day on editor (editing files and stuff)!
In college I used to be fan of notepad++ due to its light weight and enriched features. Then I started working on Ruby on Rails and I was given Ruby Mine for all the work assigned to me. It is whooping 99 dollars software and I was delighted to use it.
By the time I get used to Ruby Mine, one thing always tickles me is the time it takes to bootup/shut-down, the time it takes to run any process. No doubt, I was fascinated by the inbuilt tools in RubyMine but at the same time it also bothers me the amount of time it kill in every small process and very small space for editing code. This was for the first time, I felt the need of some light weight editor which has big room for editing the code and I jumped on Sublime!
Sublime: Awesome experience all together! Everything was so smooth and I felt like this is going to be my all-time buddy. I do miss lot of Ruby Mine features here, but not to worry, they all become secondary over the speed and simplicity Sublime provided me.
Now as a full stack developer, I got myself editing some config file on remote server. That was the first time I get to know about Vi. The mighty VI! At first I was like WT*, how to edit the file. I thought some thing happened to my system. I rebooted my system and try to edit the file again. Again the same thing!! Huhh!
I quickly googled and a moment of silence! An Editor: For Programmers By Programmers! Interesting! Anyway I somehow managed to edit the file and back again on my buddy Sublime.
Although I keep myself updated on industry news, but I never knew that developers use Vim as their complete development environment until Upcase (A subscription based web app for learning ruby on rails by ThoughtBots) happened to me.
This is the first time I installed Vim (because by default we have minified Vi on Linux) on my system and tried all over on weekend. At first it was very challenging, because its totally different from all the editors I had ever tried. It works on commands and it gives full screen to edit the file and its blazing fast!! And this is what my requirement of an editor in first place and this is what encouraged me to not going back.
And the journey to Vim began!