After an absence of about five years, I’ve finally come back to ViM, at least for a while. When I first started doing programming stuff in high school (after escaping the terror of Turbo Pascal on some weird Novell system), I used Vim, since that’s what my programming mentor/inspiration Wolever used. Not long after, however, I came across the writings of Steve Yegge, which convinced me to switch to Emacs. After that, I spent several years refining my Emacs skills and my .emacs became my emacs.d, which ballooned to about 300M. So why the switch?
As you know if you’ve been following this blog (and if you haven’t been, why not?), I recently switched from Linux to OS X and had a series of dalliances with TextMate. I think the reason that this desire for a change in editors happened at the same time as the operating system switch is not a coincidence. The Linux userland was inconsistent and annoying enough that I hated switching between programs, since they’d all have completely different UI’s, shortcuts, etc (not to mention that my computer was probably a wee bit underpowered). In that environment, it made sense to find one program that could do everything and just live there. On OS X, however, things are much more orthogonal and consistent. In this environment, small, focused, loose-coupled tools end up being preferable.
A Happy Medium?
Thus far, I’m very much enjoying using Vim. While my tastes have grown away from things as monolithic as Emacs, and TextMate is still too GUI-centric and missing certain vitial customization abilities, Vim seems to be right in the sweet spot between them. MacVim doesn’t look like as much as an anachronism as Emacs does, but I don’t need to be reaching for the mouse, or scrolling through huge menus as TextMate would require.
Closing Thought
I used to think that Emacs was obviously better because it could do so many more things; perhaps it’s a sign of maturity in my tastes that I now prefer something that does less, better? Since editor debates must always include some sort of weapon- or tool-based metaphor, here’s my contribution: Emacs is like a full tool shop, Vim is like a katana.
