Making the Switch to VIM

Well, after a couple years of using Textmate (and liking it for the most part) I’ve decided to change editors and have happily been using VIM for the last couple weeks. Why VIM? Nothing in particular stands out really. One of my co-workers is a big fan of it, I have to use it once and awhile when on the servers and emacs seemed to be a big pain in the ass :).

Here’s a few of the plugins I’ve installed that helped make me feel more at home in VIM:

NERDTree
This plugin gives you a project tree that you can use to navigate your project tree. I also mapped the ` key to toggle the tree making it super easy to open and close.

fuzzy finder and fuzzy finder textmate
These two plugins give the same functionality as cmd-t in Textmate, letting you quickly open files in the project. I mapped this to ,+t and ,+r to refresh the list.

rails vim
This gives a while pile of shortcuts and helpers for working with rails.

snipMate
Just like it sounds, this plugin gives you snippets much like Textmate has. Put that together with the snippets from scrooloose (Martin Grenfell) and we have access to lots of cool shortcuts.

These are the main plugins I added. I also included a shortcut to use ACK for search and a number of other little scripts and shortcuts to make myself more productive. I’ve got the whole set of config files up on github so you can use it, fork it, change it all you want.