Hi my name is Paul, I'm a one of the developers at applicake. I'm with applicake
for more than 2 years now and I am pretty happy with that :).
Some time ago we had an inside meeting, where this 'sharing experience'
idea came out. We all belive that it's great push. And there are no "buts" and "ifs".
Sharing is great!
Time to begin.
I am going to introduce You to text editing and how myself and most
guys at applicake handle it.
Text editing is one of the most basic things in our lives (except from eating and
drinking and everything else from the Maslov's pyramid of needs), especially in
programmer lives. I can't imagine programming without it. Could You?
There are thousand of text editors out there, but I'm not going to focus on which
one is the best, that is relative and actually I don't wont to go into
the "holly battle" beetwen vim and emacs. A text editor is good when it
meets Your needs and when You are curious enough to explore it.
For me The Text Editor is VIM. Why?
Because it's super fast, it's installed by default in all the
unix like systems and it's goes with screen - this setup is really
powerful. The Beast and the Beauty :>.
The Features, bells and whistles.
The most basic thing about VIM that it has modes. Normal, insert, visual,
command line are most common and they are extensively used in everyday's work.
- The normal mode is used for navigation and text manipulating, (h j k l keys);
- insert mode - for typing and editing;
- visual - for working with text blocks;
- command line - for giving instructions;
I believe there is one extremely important skill that you should
constantly
practice. This skill gives VIM
extra power.
That's touch typing.
VIM supports this way of typing by adding
hjkl keys. Which are simply,
arrows. h - left, j - down, k - up, l - right. Thanks to them you will never (ever!)
need to take you hands off the
home keys. (Left hand fingers rest on asdf
and the right hand finders on jkl;).
Getting back to the
modes. When you get started with VIM, you are going to be by
default in the Normal mode. You can
easilly switch between the modes: Use Esc to exit
one mode and go back to the normal mode, use "i" to switch to the insert mode,
"v" - to visual, finally Shift + ; (:) - to the command line mode. How
simple is that?
Another feature that really makes me
love VIM is the
"window splits" feature.
Pressing Shift + ; (:) and typing sp/vsp filename/dir (:sp/:vsp filename/dir), splits your
window horizontally or vertically and opens a file or a directory. When you want to move
beetween splits you need to press CTRL + w and one of hjkl buttons, depending on where you
split is located. Yon can copy, and paste beetween splits too.
VIM has tons of cool things, if this
teaser make you want to look deeper into VIM,
try
vim.org where You'll find all necessary stuff about this editor.
As a programmer, I find VIM really useful, fast and... FUN!. I'm a geek to such extent..
that this post is edited with VIM :). I am definitely going to write something more about VIM,
Screen and ratpoison soon so stay tuned.
Added by: pawel
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