Vim Mind Share Soaring: Roundup of 10 Vim articles, recent and older gems

Am I the only one to notice that there is a lot of vim love in the airwaves recently? I saw the trend very clearly, spanning from reddit to news.yc and let me say that the material that came up recently is very good; those neat posts prompted me to improve my vimrc dramatically and I really like what I learned.

In this installment, instead than annotating my vimrc (another one? not that interesting, I’ll refrain) , I want to compile a roundup of the best vim articles I saw recently. I’ll also add a few classics that changed me from a hater to a vim lover and will conclude with some minor tips out of my bag. So here we go with the roundup.

Recent Vim Articles Roundup

Jamis Buck switches back to vim from a period using TextMate and talks about his experience and his configuration. Many useful tips in there in the posts Vim Follow Up and Coming Home To Vim

Stephen Bach presents his sensible defaults for your vimrc, recommended: Configuring Vim Right

Learnr dev blog shows some additional configuration options that totally make sense and I incorporated in my config too: Configuring Vim Some More

Swaroop C H gives us A byte of vim a new free e-book on vim, worth reading. Covers also advanced topics like writing your own plug-ins.

And Effective Vim ends the recent vim trend spotting.

But there are some older links that are worth sharing in my opinion.

Older Vim Gems

By Jonathan McPherson: Efficient Editing With Vim

This is a true gem, an intermediate level tutorial that will convert you from a beginner vim user to a way more proficient one.

By Jerry Wang: vi for smarties

Very good beginners guide to vim.

By David Rayner: best of vim tips

Raw tips from a very long time vi/vim user

Vim is also great for Python development, three ideas

vim omnicomplete awesomeness

How to make vim a modular Python IDE

How to replicate SLIME in vim

Finally a few tips from myself

vimperator: If you’re a heavy vim user you might want to checkout the great Firefox extension vimperator. You’ll find yourself browsing mouse-less with familiar vim keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I love it.

viPlugin for Eclipse: If you’re a Java developer (been there, done that) and you’re stuck with Eclipse, you definitely want to have viPlugin. It makes the Eclipse experience something much more pleasurable for one who has vi keystrokes embedded in the fingers.

cool color scheme: If you’ve seen “some“ screen-casts and you have just a subterranean TextMate envy and you can’t stop thinking at that cool color-scheme, well think no more, you can use this one or my humbly tweaked version. For delicious users here is the page of my bookmarks that made me notice the trend.

Ending note

For full disclosure I have to say that I have been - and still am sometimes - an Emacs user. One of the rebel ones daring enough to use Viper mode. So now you know.

26 November 2008