Update: Since this topic deserves a little more than a post, I have moved this post to a separate article which I shall keep expanding over time.

First, some background. Lets just say that I lost my editor virginity to Vim. It was a brief, but violent introduction — the modal editing was too unfamiliar, the learning curve too steep. After dabbling with a few other conventional editors (such as KWrite), I settled upon Emacs (XEmacs actually, but thats another story).

For the next three years, I tweaked my .emacs file, fiddled around with settings and plugins and modes, played games and browsed the web, checked my email and newsgroups, all within the comfortable confines of Emacs. But I was getting wary of the long startup times and (at that time) the inability to use the same interface and features in console mode (such as over SSH) as in GUI mode. It was time to move on.

I rediscovered Vim around 6 years ago. I started with a clean slate. As the saying goes, Emacs is an operating system that also happens to have an editor in it. The relatively more focused feature set of Vim was refreshing in comparison. I loved that I could work in GUI mode, save my session, go back home and resume my session in a terminal over SSH, which the exact same interface and keybindings. I quickly became very productive with Vim, and over the years have honed my plugins, settings and color themes to just how I like them.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about this again, and I might just reconsider Vim. I highly recommend reading these two blog posts to better understand where I’m coming from:

• From Vim to Emacs — Part I
• From Vim to Emacs — Part II

Don’t get me wrong — I think Vim still has a lot to offer. But, I can not deny that Vim is not what I would call a “forward looking editor.” Here’s why:

• Development community: the Emacs development community is a lot more open and vibrant right now than the Vim community. Part of this has to do with the BDFL model in Vim. Bram Moolenar has done a tremendous job in bringing Vim to the stage where it is. People can and have forked Vim in the past. But for one reason or another, Vim has stayed Vim, and its development trajectory has been slow and incremental.
• Source code: Vim’s source code is not clean. At all. I just briefly skimmed over the source tree for Emacs 23, and it looks a lot more understandable and well structured.
• Architecture: Vim 7 finally got spell check. But the spell check does not use any of the existing tools or formats. Vim has its own scripting language, with its own interpreter, grammer and data structures. Why not just use one of the many wonderful programming languages out there? Yes, there are interfaces to allow writing Vim code in Python, Ruby, Perl etc. But why reinvent the wheel all over again?

When Bram Moolenaar — the lead developer of Vim –  joined Google, I had hoped that Vim would generate a lot more interest and enthusiasm. But so far, it hasn’t changed much.

And so, in the next few weeks, I’m going to take another look at Vim as well as Emacs. I’ll try to do an objective evaluation of where the editors stand today, where I perceive they are headed. I hope to make my decision on whether to move away from Vim or not by the end of this year.

I use vim as my editor of choice. As I note above, to each his own editor.

However, Vim is not what one would call a “sexy editor”. After all, it has been around (in some shape or form) since before I was born. It does not generate as much buzz in the blogosphere and is not the darling of all the new kids on the block, as some of the other editors out there. Not many Ruby on Rails developers, for instance, seem to be using Vim for coding (actually, saying that a lot of RoR developers seem to be using Textmate is probably more accurate, but you get the point). It is written in C and does not use git for hosting. The Vim website leaves much to be desired. In the social networking world, Vim barely has a presence.

But, I contend that Vim still has a lot to offer. Here are few of the things you can check out to spruce up your Vim usage:

• xoria256: a modern, functional and eye-pleasing color scheme.
• snipMate: Textmate like snippets for Vim. Interestingly, snipmate lives on github. There are actually several textmate like plugins for Vim, I prefer snipMate. I have succesfully used snippetsEmu in the past.
• Omni completion: Probably not as awesome as Visual Studio’s, but useful nonetheless.
• Check out my list of some essential vim plugins.
• A byte of Vim: from the author of the well known “A byte of Python” book.

I’m also very happy to see the number of Vim related repositories on github. Bottomline: don’t give up on Vim. Vim is still sexy baby, you just need to look in the right places :)

Update: I’m including a screenshot of Xoria below.

You can see the tabs in action here. Tabs work in console mode as well (which is partly why they are not as pretty, as say tabs in Firefox). You can configure the display of text in invidual tabs (duh!).


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Suweet.