Hmmm. I started programming on an old ICL OPD (anyone else remember microdrives?). There was some fooling about afterwards with an IBM PS/2 system (woo-hoo, 40Mb of hard disk space!), but the first time I hit what I thought of as a real machine was on a unix account in the first week of college. And that’s when I first hit the biggest question any starting computer engineer hits (or used to hit, back then): Vi or Emacs.
Back then, I chose Vi by default, in that it was the first thing I came across and command/edit mode switching actually made sense to me. And I used vi for a good while afterwards, until I finally found, and immediately switched to, vim. I’ve used vim ever since for any task where I could use it on any platform where I could get it (in fact, not being able to use it for wordpress blogging ticks me off). Being able to run around a source code file in command mode and dd or y lines from here and p them over there, or J them together or call up boxes with an <F4> remap to give me a nice easy-to-spot function header, those are things I’ve gotten down to the reflex level at this stage. In short, I like vim. It’s small, fast, uncluttered. And don’t talk to me about tabbed editing and intellisense and debugger integration please, that’s been in vim for quite some time if you want it (and frankly, if you’re using Visual Studio anything and telling me it has a better editor, you seriously need to stop wasting your time). Not to mention the fact that everytime I’ve seen something like intellisense in actual use, it’s been used by some rather lazy programmers. Which isn’t to say … Read the rest
