Happy Viming

In Programming Meets Editing I mentioned that my favorite editor is gVim, and that I was considering buying ViEmu so I could use the Vim input model inside Visual Studio. Today I finally got myself in gear and bought ViEmu and installed it at work.

ViEmu shoutout: Its impressive. It can't be easy to make Visual Studio play well with the Vim input model, but ViEmu manages it flawlessly. It even has a pretty smart method of managing Visual Studio's keybindings. If you want to go in and out of "ViEmu mode" it will disable and enable conflicting keybindings for you.

If you've ever been interested in learning Vim, the ViEmu developer Jon has created some really nice "graphical cheat sheets" that make learning Vim quite a bit easier. He has also written some good articles on why Vim is so nice: "Why, oh WHY..." and "The Vi input model". Those articles will sum it up better than I can, so I recommend you check them out if you're at all interested.

But that's not going to stop me from throwing in my own 2 cents. What makes Vim great?

• It is comfortable to use
• It lets you say what you want to do
  

Its comfortable because your fingers hardly ever have to leave the home row. Just the fact that you can move the cursor around with out moving your hand over to the arrow keys becomes really nice. I'm serious! It seems like such a minor thing, but after you've used it that way for awhile, going back will annoy you. Its like when you have a badly designed UI where you have to type in a text box, then move the mouse to select the next box, then type more, then move the mouse, then type more, etc.

Another example is the "t" and "f" keys which are like mini searches. "t" means to and "f" means find. Type "fa" and it will move your cursor to the next occurrence of the letter a on the current line. "ta" will move your cursor to right before the next occurrence. "T" and "F" go backwards. Again this is nice because it replaces a string of keyboard actions that might look like "ctl+right,ctl+right,right,right,right" Not only is that simply more keystrokes, it also requires you to move your hands around and perform some control key acrobatics.

Both of these examples demonstrate how Vim is comfortable. The second also demonstrates how it lets me say what I mean. Instead of using a combination of meaningless movement keys to get to the letter a, I said "go to a." At first blush this doesn't seem like it would matter, but as the Vim commands become second nature you can start talking to your editor at a much higher level without thinking about it.

It lets you stay focused on what you're trying to do to the text and not how to do it.

Its important to note that these are just the simplest examples I could think of. Vim has A LOT more to offer. Its also important to answer this question: will it make you more productive? Maybe, I don't know, its hard to say. Does it matter? If it makes you more comfortable and less irritated (ctl+right,ctl+right,ctl+right,ctl+right,ctl+right...), isn't that good enough? After all, I'm going to guess you spend a lot of time typing into that editor of yours.

Finally, if you're interested in giving Vim a shot I would certainly encourage it. It does have a pretty steep learning curve, but the cool thing is you can still do all the "notepad" style editing things you're used to. So you can learn it at whatever pace you want to, one feature at a time. If you're in Visual Studio, ViEmu has a 30 day trial. If you're in Eclipse, there is a Vi plugin. And if you're just editing text there's always gVim.

Programming meets Editing

Editing text is a significant part of programming. Sure, you spend a lot of time thinking, and a lot of time scribbling on paper and white boards. But you do a ton of editing as well. The only way you can get out of editing is by getting out of programming.

It is interesting that, though editing is such a large part of programming, it is relatively ignored. In my Tools of the Trade: Keyboard post I pointed out that having a comfortable keyboard seems like it should be important given how much typing a programmer does. Along those same lines, it seems like having a good editor should be just as important, if not more so.

I think there are two kinds of programmers, those who have a favorite editor, and those who have never bothered to think about it. Most of the best programmers I know have spent a fair amount of time experimenting with different editors. As usual, wasting time messing with editors doesn't make you a good programmer, and I've known some extremely good programmers who never thought twice about it. On the other hand, generally the people who take the time to think about things like text editors are also the people who think about things like writing good code. I even think that would be a good interview question, "Do you have a favorite text editor?" You could learn a surprising amount about a person's background and actual coding experience through that question.

My favorite editor is Vim, gVim actually. I started editing in the Quick C DOS editor. Then later I used the Zeus editor. Then I stumbled on Vim. And of course, Visual Studio. I had friends in school who used UltraEdit, and recently I've read a lot of hype around Text Mate and the windows clone, E Text Editor. I have never personally used Emacs. I took some time to read about it not long ago, but I've never gone so far as to install it and spend time with it. I tried jEdit for a short period of time, but gave up on it because it took too long to start up.

In the search for an editor I find myself trying to figure out exactly what it is I'm looking for. What makes a good text editor. I think these factors are part of it:

• Expressivity
  How much can I say and how well can I say it? Ultimately I want to be able to express at a high level what I want to have happen to the text.
  
• Composability
  Are there a series of flexible commands which can be combined to perform more complicated operations?
  
• Psychic ability
  Does the editor know what I'm doing and help me do it by abstracting out the tedious details? For example, Intellisense, snippets, and auto word completion.
  
• Comfort
  Can I type commands easily, or am I performing acrobatic arts with my fingers on the keyboard?
  
• Speed
  Is it faster than editing in Notepad?
• Keeps me oriented
  Keeps me from getting lost in my files and directories

Interestingly these really divide into two categories, you have the strictly text manipulation issues such as speed, comfort, and expressivity. Then you have the more "management" and domain specific issues such as psychic ability and keeping you oriented. Vim is very good at the text manipulation parts, but weak in the management parts. Visual Studio on the other hand is very strong in the management parts.

Visual Studio with Intellisense and re-sharper's background compilation really is wonderful. Add the solution explorer to that and life is pretty good. I wouldn't use an editor that didn't have those features knowing that they exist in Visual Studio. Thus at work I use Visual Studio and not gVim.

Because of this I think I'm going to spring for a ViEmu license. I've used it for the trial period twice now, once on my old computer, once on my new computer. Each time I love having it, but its pricey so I haven't committed yet.

What editor do you use? What editor do you wish you could use?