> Vim to me seems like an ever expanding series of configuration files and keyboard tricks to get something remotely powerful.
I used to feel this way but I hated Eclipse enough to push through and get past it. Once you get over the barrier of learning how .vimrc works, vim documentation and a few choice plugins, it becomes extremely hard to even begin to consider using other tools. Some IDE-like things I can do with vim and its various plugins that aren't normally quoted:
- jump to a file in a codebase by typing in a smattering of chars in its filepath and hitting enter (using CommandT)
- jump to a method definition from a call to it (using ctags).
- Rsync a directory up to a remote server on save (`using autocmd BufPostWrite :!rsync blah` in .vimrc)
Its taken me a couple of years of use and a lot of time figuring out vim, but at the end of I have a lightning fast dev environment with similar features to the big IDE's customized to work _exactly_ how I want it to.
If you'd prefer something that has all of that turned on by default and doesn't require as much effort to get up and running with, you're probably better off figuring out how to speed up your existing tools than moving to something else wholesale. A lot of rails developers like TextMate as an editor with a nice gui and some IDE bells and whistles, but I've never tried it.
As a side note, I sincerely believe that emacs is a comparably awesome environment to work with, but I don't think I will ever try it. I've got things so cushy in vim that its more or less a solved problem for me.
I used to feel this way but I hated Eclipse enough to push through and get past it. Once you get over the barrier of learning how .vimrc works, vim documentation and a few choice plugins, it becomes extremely hard to even begin to consider using other tools. Some IDE-like things I can do with vim and its various plugins that aren't normally quoted:
- jump to a file in a codebase by typing in a smattering of chars in its filepath and hitting enter (using CommandT) - jump to a method definition from a call to it (using ctags). - Rsync a directory up to a remote server on save (`using autocmd BufPostWrite :!rsync blah` in .vimrc)
Its taken me a couple of years of use and a lot of time figuring out vim, but at the end of I have a lightning fast dev environment with similar features to the big IDE's customized to work _exactly_ how I want it to.
If you'd prefer something that has all of that turned on by default and doesn't require as much effort to get up and running with, you're probably better off figuring out how to speed up your existing tools than moving to something else wholesale. A lot of rails developers like TextMate as an editor with a nice gui and some IDE bells and whistles, but I've never tried it.
As a side note, I sincerely believe that emacs is a comparably awesome environment to work with, but I don't think I will ever try it. I've got things so cushy in vim that its more or less a solved problem for me.