Vim tips

Bram Moolenaar: Seven habits of effective text editing.

Here’s my deal: I get frustrated with Xcode rather often. (Xcode is wonderful except for the things that bug me.) So I was inspired by Mark Dalrymple’s post on using Emacs for Cocoa development to consider a command-line alternative.

I’ve been using Emacs and Vim both, trying to find out which I prefer. You know what? It’s a tough call. I actually don’t have a position in this particular holy war.

On the one hand, Emacs really is all it’s cracked up to be—that is, it’s practically an entire operating system on its own. Vim suits my philosophy and aesthetics better.

Except that Vim’s being modal continues to freak me out. It’s as if my brain refuses to deal with this, and I keep typing commands when I want to type text. Then I curse and wonder what the hell just happened to my document.

Which is better for C and Objective-C editing? The idea is to run Xcode only when I absolutely need to.

On the other hand, maybe I can use BBEdit instead. For all that I’ve used BBEdit over the years, I’ve never used it for C/Objective-C programming. (I use it for plain text, HTML, PHP, to-do lists, etc.)

I’ll have to investigate.