From: Zayd Connor Date: 2009-02-24T15:03:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Help/Cannot Open Ruby Project in Ide Jeff Schwab wrote: > Zayd Connor wrote: >> >> I tried using vim before, installed it, opened it up and was very >> clueless, I need to take some serious tutorial lessons in order to mess >> around with it :). I been reading and hearing alot of good things about >> Vim > > http://www.vim.org/docs.php > > If you're on something Unixy, try running vimtutor. It fits nicely in a > standard 80x24 terminal, and should take 25-30 minutes. You could run > gvimtutor instead, but I find that half the power is Vim's integration > with the command line. > > The rest of this post is a sob story that can safely be ignored. :) > > When I was in college (ten years ago), I had some exposure to vi (which > I found impossible to use, I could never figure out how to exit, and > what the heck were those tildes?) and emacs (which kept messing up my > formatting, and always thought it knew better than I did). > > At my first post-college job, I spent about four years using XEmacs. I > lived in it. My mail client (VM) was an Emacs plugin, and so was one of > the web browsers I used quite a bit (W3). Then I had wrist problems > from bilateral ganglian cysts, apparently caused by Repetitive Stress > Syndrom from twisting my wrists to hit emacs "key chords." The pain got > so bad I couldn't type. The first surgery was quick and painless, but > the problem came back. The second surgery was more serious, and kept me > out of work, with my right arm propped up in this stupid orange foam > block, for two weeks. > > When I finally got back to work, I decided to try vi again. (I didn't > know the difference between vi and vim, which is akin to the difference > between C and C++). For the first two days or so, it was like learning > a new language. Then, I started to learn "the vim way," to borrow a > Rubyism. For starters, I didn't have to do everything directly in Vim: > I could quit and restart at will, because the start-up time was > lightning fast! And then -- holy crap -- I didn't need to figure out > (my-what my-elisp-command my-I my-needed), because Vim has special > support for working with traditional Unix command-line filters. It's > trivial to write a shell script and have Vim invoke it on selected text. > After a while, I could do 90% of what I did in emacs, and do it a > whole lot faster. Eventually, I found out about GNU Screen, which got > me back the shells-in-buffers I had used in emacs, so then I was up to > about 95% of the emacs stuff. > > I'm still learning. One thing I missed until recently was the emacs > function that walks you through search-and-replace, one replacement at a > time; then, last week, I learned about Vim's /c modifier, so problem > solved. I went to learn some vimscript recently, and found -- lo and > behold -- Vim also has bindings to Ruby, Tcl, and several other > scripting (okay, "dynamic") languages. The documentation is, as far as > I know, unparalleled. > > When I use an IDE now, it's like a toy. With Vim on Unix (incuding > Linux and OS X), my whole system is the IDE. I'm not an expert on > Eclipse or Visual Studio, but I have used them both professionally, and > what I've seen does not hold a candle to Vim. Vim's learning curve > seems high at first, but if you code for a living, you're going to save > a heck of a lot more time than you spend coming up to speed. I'm happy that you had a graceful recovery, everything happens for a reason, look how your injury made you to become more proficient and an expert using VIM :) I'm really going to try Vim out, I tried before and got kind of discouraged,because I'm still a ruby beginner, but I really hated to give up on vim, the feeling of actually getting the hang of something that was once puzzling is one of the greatest feelings. Could I benefit as a beginner using VIM? I think I possibly could. Is it hard to build a rails app with VIM? Either way I will go ahead and give it a shot and learn. :) Thanks -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.