zooloo

Being an amateur programmer makes choosing the editor of choice a very important decision. I’ve been using lots of editors to do my stuff. At first I made in line code in Spectrum Basic and later on using gwbasic, that came with MSDOS. But this was not really editing, just throwing lines hoping that the interpreter did not complain too much.

When I moved to compiled code I first started with PE2 at clipper summer classes I took one year (I don’t know why the hell I took clipper classes at the age of 14). I could not say much about it other that it was the first real editor I tried, it resembled vim a bit. After this I started learning pascal using Turbo/Borland Pascal 6. I really liked the editor, that where the first key strokes I learnt and I used through all my DOS life. My other editor was Dos Navigator embedded editor that had the same key bindings as Borland editors.

Entering in linux world was a bit disappointing as the first time I started it I had only vi to edit files. I couldn’t even find how to exit the editor in a standard way, only killing it! I started to hate vi and clones. I found joe and used along with jed in linux until I started my first (and only) job.

In 98/99 I switched from DOS to Windows and programmed using Visual C++ so my editor of choice in Windows was Visual Studio. I also installed a plugin for it called Visual Assist. It was a joy back then to have that powerful class browser and code completion.

I was living so happy with the tools I was using until I started to work. At job I work as Unix technician so the first thing I made was compiling joe in every computer I had to work with (scripting, editing configuration files and sometimes bug hunting in others code). But after some months I had to work in more machines and some of them had some exotic versions of unix. There was the time when I decide to start learning vi as it was installed in every machine, my work colleages where also happily using vi so this also pushed me to use it. At first it was more a pain than anything else but as I started learning tricks from my work colleages and my experience with it grew I became a happy vim user. I could change things with a few keystrokes, find using regular expressions and even had automatic macros of the last editing command. I also began to use vim in Windows as most of my mistakes in Visual C++ where the text ”:w” at the end of some lines :)

Now I use vim in every platform I touch for code and configuration editing purposes. But I also feel the need of an IDE where to manage the entire project, compile and perhaps debug from it. Recently I brought an iBook and tried TextMate, that impressed me a lot after seeing the rails demo video. I really like it but I do not feel as good with it as with vim. Perhaps is that I do not have the same experience with TextMate and I’m not used to its key bindings but I came back to vim again. I’ve just tried gvim for MacOSX and I am do delighted with its features (like code folding, auto completion and such things). gvim was found after reading this Jamis Buck blog post. I will also try some editors/IDEs commented there but I do not want to sacrifice editing smoothness I have with vim for a fill featured IDE solution. I’ll try to find a way to use vim and also manage my projects but I think I will fall back to shell as project manager and launching vim for each file I want to edit.