Vim - first impression

When I first looked at Vim it was a very short experience that was literally as follows

	# from the command line
	vim test.md
	*vim opens*
	"What's that?"
	*CTRL + C* 
	"How do I even close this?!"
	*opens browser, googles "how to close VIM"*
	ESC + :q

That was it and that was my Vim experience for quite some time. However, lately I see more and more people talking about Vim being the single best editor for everything - no matter what language one writes. A site notice here: I still use Sublime Text (2) daily and love it, I have it configured as I like, have all my Plugin and color schemes and it just feels great. I tried some other editors like Brackets and Atom, also WebStorm and PhpStorm. The later two are great as IDEs but are not the way I like to write code because both are a lot slower than a simple text editor like atom, sublime of vim. I guess that’s the downside of having an IDE - for me it was too much (I still recommend trying them, maybe they enhance your workflow). Atom is really like a clone of Sublime Text running Web Technologies at it’s heart (Sublime Text is written in Python).

Anyway, back to Vim. Vim is, what surprised me first, a command line-based editor, there is a Graphic UI version called gVim but I wanted to see how I can customize the command line one. Just like the normal bash has a .bashrc Vim has its own .vimrc which defines the settings for all its (advanced) functionality and settings. When you open Vim with from the command line with vim my-file.md you’ll see a black editor with some “~” on the left. You’re now in “normal” mode and need to tab i to start inserting stuff. From within the insert mode its really like any other editor. When you leave the insert mode (by pressing ESC) you’re back in the “Normal” mode where you can easily navigate through your file and delete stuff. Deleting works pretty cool I guess, just double tab d to delete a whole sentence or x to delete the character below the cursor. Or fancy stuff like d + arrow up/down to delete a whole paragraph.

So basically everything in Vim is bound to keys and those keys can be combined (like delete + up) and I am sure there’s even more power inside Vim when it comes to text manipulation, navigation, replacements, etc. Anyway, as long as I haven’t found out what stuff is possible I’ll just share my .vimrc with you.

	{% raw %}
	" vim:fdm=marker
	set nocompatible " required by Vundle
	filetype off " required by Vundle

	" Vundle Settings {{{
	" set the runtime path to include Vundle and initialize
	set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
	call vundle#begin()

	" make Vundle manage itself.
	Plugin 'gmarik/Vundle.vim'

	" Emmet - I just can not work without this powerful helper
	Plugin 'mattn/emmet-vim'

	" Vim Airline is some kind of fancy status bar thingy I guess.
	Plugin 'bling/vim-airline'

	" this needs to be called after all Plugins are loaded
	call vundle#end()
	filetype plugin indent on

	" }}}

	" Syntax highlighting and vim style {{{

	" enable syntax highlighting
	syntax on

	"setting the color scheme to github, which is places in ~/.vim/colors
	set t_Co=256
	colorscheme Tomorrow

	" vim Airline settings
	" set airline to be displayed all the time (default is only in split mode)
	set laststatus=2
	let g:airline_left_sep = '▶'
	let g:airline_right_sep = '◀'

	" line number
	set number
	" }}}

	" write settings {{{
	set tabstop=2
	set shiftwidth=2
	set backspace=indent,eol,start
	set smarttab
	set formatoptions+=t " wikia said I need this
	set tw=120 " text width
	set colorcolumn=120 " addes a ruler to the right side of Vim
	" }}}

	" No backups and no swap file
	set nobackup
	set noswapfile
	{% endraw %}

So that’s quite some stuff I guess. First of all, Vundle is the Plugin manager for Vim, there are others but I chose this one because it is 99% written in VimL. This little thingy helps me keep track of Plugins I use. Friendly. syntax on simply turn on syntax highlighting. set t_Co=256 sets the terminal colors to 256 colors so the colorscheme Tomorrow (here) works. Next up is Airline, a “better statusbar” for Vim. I saw this on a screenshot once and searched for it, what I first found was Powerline but I then saw Airline and chose it because it is written in VimL and I - as of now - try to avoid language mixin because I think it’s a good idea to keep Vim “clean” as long as possible. Airline can show in what mode I am, what Git Branch I’m on, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t configured yet. I guess that’ll be another blog post. The airline_left_sep and airline_right_sep are the separators of the statusline (see the screenshot below, the seperators are down after “Normal” and before the “1%") which at the moment don’t look as cool as I thought - have to fix this. Next up tabstops, shiftwidth (self explaining), backspace (I’ve no idea what this is but saw it in any .vimrc I found) smarttabs, text width so Vim doesn’t write until the end of the screen (I like small gaps to the right) and colorcolumn, which is a ruler-like thingy to visually show the max text width. Last stuff: No backups, no swap files, according to a blog post I found this isn’t needed when working with version controls such as git.

The weird looking brackets are used to “auto-close” this section so that when I open my file only the description is visible - this makes a long .vimrc a lot more readable.

So that’s it, my tiny Vim experience and setup. As with every config things you can grab a copy of my .vimrc in the Github Config Repo.