Why I use Vim
As programmers we often defend passionately our choices of tools and start holy wars with people who have made different choices. When it comes to text editors my favorite one is Vim, so let me list some of the arguments used by me in the past to “defend” my choice:
- Vim is free: That’s really cool but in the past I have paid for text editors like Textmate.
- Vim is open source: Another great reason but I also use propietary software like Mac OS X.
- Vim is everywhere: Totally true, but some people use Emacs on their daily work and they know just enough Vim to modify some file in a remote server from time to time.
- Vim is lightweight: Also true, but except for big graphical IDEs almost all text editors/IDEs are lightweight enough to run in my laptop.
- Vim is powerful: I’ve learned only 1% of the things you can do. Hell, I don’t even know how to use registers, macros or the ex mode yet (ohhhh, shame on me).
As you can see, none of the previous arguments is strong enough, so why I still use this text editor? The real reason why I use Vim is because it is like programming your text processing. I love programming and avoiding repetitive tasks so I use Vim because it is fun.
So, should every programmer use Vim because is the one and true text editor? No! Should every programmer try Vim to see if it’s the best tool for their job? Yes! Tools are merely tools, what’s really important is what we do with them. The best tool doesn’t exist, what exists is the best tool for you to do some job.
In fact, even when I want to learn the 99% of the things I still don’t know how to use so I can get the most out of Vim, I want to try Emacs soon.