Yet another textmate to macvim article
By Alex Kessinger on
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Using vim, in any form, has been a goal of mine for years. As I write this I am typing in macvim. Making vim a larger part of my flow has been a goal of mine ever since I began using the command line. Seriously, I new that vim was the shit. In the begging it was like admiring a really good pen, or thinking that Shun knifes are cool because the look good. I didn’t actually know if vim was any good, it just felt cool. Now I know that vim is not only a badass, it’s better too. Like my programming languages, I like to make sure the stuff I am using is at least decade strong. This can sound like I am being snobby asshole, I know, but really I just mean I want there to be a critical mass. My texteditor should be around for at least a decaode. Textmate fit that bill, and it probably has more than decade up on deck, but I feel like vim is a century long ecosystem. The first thing it has is that it’s open source. Second, and this is just my uneducated look, vim is the muscle car. There are people who use vim who can pop the hood and fix vim. You can’t really do that with your new beamer just like you can’t really do that with textmate. I can’t pop the hood, at least not yet, but just that people can makes me happy. My want to use vim at first was driven by my need to hang out with the cool kids. It has evolved to break my addiction to just one editor. I don’t want to be beholden to Textmate for the rest of my life, especially given it’s release schedule. Textmate is like a ghost ship in the night running full stream ahead, but the destination is unclear. Thanks to an active community its kept steam, but I keep seeing public defections, like the old company I used to work for, that tipped me off the possibility of something going awry. In the same way that I never just wanted to be a PHP guy, or a Javascript guy I didn’t want to be the Textmate guy. It’s a funny experience telling someone you want to switch to vim, becuase it feels cool. In some circles they want to sit around gab about how awesome it is to update your editor. I like doing that, but you have to realize that you aren’t getting any work done. You are better off sticking to whatever the fuck you know and pumping good shit. That being said I still know that I want to jump ships. There will be a small productivity hit, but I reduce that by not being a zealot. I started this article in macvim, really I did, but I am finishing it in Textmate because I move faster in Textmate. At work when it’s crunch time, or there is a serious bug I need to fix I don’t dilly dally around in macvim, I just switch back to Textmate. For awhile I can see myself having my project open in both editors simultaneously for a while. Actually this reminds me of something I saw Bredan Eich speak about. I was watching a presentation of his the other night and he mentioned Hermeneutic circle. 
It’s how I learned any large non-school thing. PHP, Python, Linux, Javascript. All things that are core to my job. You need to stand on the outside, then dive in, then stand outside and dive in.