Ugh. Not sure about you, but I think HN should be a IDE/Editor blog post restricted site.

There was recently a thread on erlang-general that was almost 100 replies long. It started out as "Is Erlang a Good First Language?"... then slowly dissolved into "IDE Bashing". I had to switch my mailing list options to digest I was getting so many emails each day with personal rants.

The thing is, Emacs and Vim are awesome, and they are "huge" programs. Also, they are "extremely" flexible, so one persons preferences might be way different than the others. For example, the blog post here uses MacVim and GVim? That's crazy talk (IMHO).

RTFM!

The reason MacVim and GVim were both mentioned was b/c the setup mentioned would work with either. Never messed with setting up Vim on Windows and wanted to be explicit as to not lead people down a painful path or to get troubleshooting requests.

The other intent was to show people how they could easily set up Vim as a robust Rails editor without needing to learn a ton about how to install Vim plugins which normally assume a strong understanding of Vim to install and get started with.

That's horrible! No one should ever have to use digest mode, especially since it makes the list even worse for everyone else. Maybe you should get a better email client? I know some people that use Gmail as a mailing list client independently from their normal mail.

"Maybe you should get a better email client? "

I hear Emacs is an E-mail client ...

And it manages mailing lists quite well.

Poor article in the sense that it does little more than list out the plugins, rather than providing some commentary on how each plugin improves productivity.

I was disappointed as well.

I do recommend the articles listed on the Rails wiki's 'Text Editors' page for Vim, though: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/text-editors

(Listed here in case that page is changed: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/10/10/coming-home-to-vim, http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/17/vim-follow-up, http://biodegradablegeek.com/2007/12/using-vim-as-a-complete...)

The headline is cheerful, ironic attention-grabbing; the writer acknowledges text editor choice is a preference, then lays out briefly how to set up vim for RoR development.

I was hoping to see some awesome new features that we could use in other editors. Kind of a let down.

No offence, but this comment sounds more like a one generated by a bot of some kind.

I'd love to see the code for such a bot! Well, me and a thousand NLP researchers, I'm sure.

[edit] NLP being Natural Language Processing, rather than Neuro-Linguistic Programming ;)

Please tell me more about bots of this kind.

shrug I almost didn't read the link because I halfway expected lame editor advocacy. There's a non-RTFAing comment or two already that assumes it is.

More like JokeExplainer from Reddit.

Translation: The author uses a flame to bait people into reading his opinion.

The thing that always gets me when trying to use either vim and emacs for IDE-like programming (and don't get me wrong...I have used vim for regular editing for years), is that someone says, "yeah, (vim|emacs) destroys all other editors and IDEs. You just need to install this list of 400 plugins, write some elisp to configure it, learn each of these 200 keystrokes, understand where the plugins overlap and contradict, and you're golden".

Versus, download Eclipse/Netbeans, open, and start coding.

I want to use vim as an IDE...I just don't have the time.

When I tried Eclipse, I found it as foreign as emacs, just GUIer. IDEs and editors require learning and configuration once you get much past notepad or pico.

It sounds like the challenge is similar to that of a Linux distribution: where it's not just a matter of "installing Linux", but choosing one that has most of what you want already.

Perhaps there's a need to have "vim distributions" and "emacs distributions" that come pre-installed and preconfigured according to certain needs, such as this one.

I too use tabstop=2

But `cat` uglifies it, so I added this to ~/.bashrc:

    alias tab='sed "s/\t/  /g" '

You needn't say "cat myfile | tab"; you can just use it exactly like cat: "tab myfile" (I'm not saying that you'd not instantly realize that - but that I didn't).

unless you prefer tabs, you can add:

set expandtab

to your .vimrc and then vim will magically insert spaces (according to your tabstop/shiftwidth) instead of real tabs.

:retab will turn all tabs into spaces for a file that already has tabs in it.

thanks! "Vim contains every features you could possibly imagine, and then some. Even when taking this law into account" - 10ren's Law

I generally use something like:

    expand -t "$tabWidth" "${files[@]}" | nl -b a | fold -s -w 108 | $PAGER

when I want to view files that use tabs; this is the final one-liner in a script I call 'view'. It gives me tabs expanded to width I specify (defaults 4), numbered lines, and long lines wrapped at word breaks but such that they don't break line numbering.

You needn't ever say "cat myfile | ..." period!

The shell has stdin redirection built in via '<'

Unless you want to read your pipeline from left to right, like everything else you read.

What if you want the subject on the right, like all non-pipeline commands you read?

  foo myfile
  bar < myfile
  (bar | baz) < myfile

you can also say

  $ < file executable

What happened to TIMTOWTDI? :-)

What's TIMTOW? And why would you want a turbo diesel, fuel injected version of it?

"There's More Than One Way To Do It" is a Perl philosophy.

The main reason for the post was that at Hashrocket we benefit from real-time streaming Vim plugins courtesy of Tim Pope and wanted to share how awesome it can be as a Rails editor. I plan to follow up with more on the individual plugins themselves. It would've been a small novel to try and cover each of the plugins themselves in any detail. Most have a solid README on the project page for starters.

I thought the article was worth while if only for pointing me at various plugins I wasn't aware of. If you're a vim hardcore then this is probably nothing new... but for others who are not it seemed useful. I agree that having some more info on why these plugins are useful would be nice, but following the links was easy enough to see if the plugin was interesting.

I expected to see a bit more of how to use all those plugins. But I suppose a list of them is better than nothing.

+ for mentioning all tpope's plugins/bundles.

- for some poor suggestions.

Pray tell, what are your suggestions and criticisms? A friend of mine after a horrible computer bitswap, bit into vim after TextMate. I wanted to follow, just to learn. This is actually fantastic for me -- there are various . configs I knew nothing of, but now can grep/google for info.

Please advise.

He had some things incorrect that have been mostly fixed now. Don't worry too much about it.

FYI, I suggest leaving tabstop=8 if you indent with spaces like a good boy.

Thanks for the good feedback to the post. I responded to the latest feedback from you and discussed with the Pope.

Cream is a good VIM editor on Windows.

I never seemed to understand cream.

The idea is to take vim and basically castrate it by getting rid of the standard keybindings and ways of doing things to make it 'easier' for non-vim users. It even appears they got rid of modal-editing.

The issue with this then they don't learn how to do things the vim way which defeats the purpose of using vim, just go use notepad++ or any other gui editor you get the same experience.

Agreed. You can go into "expert" mode and use it with the normal vim bindings, though. Used in this manner, it does provide a bit of a better introduction to vim, as you learn the various modes and keybindings, but still get a reasonable UI for configuration and whatnot.

I tried cream for a bit, and decided that I would be much better off juts learning to use vim qua vi, rather than trying to make it more like the typical win32 editor.