VIM Destroys All Other Rails Editors

Ugh. Not sure about you, but I think HN should be a IDE/Editor blog post restricted site.<p>There was recently a thread on erlang-general that was almost 100 replies long. It started out as "Is Erlang a Good First Language?"... then slowly dissolved into "IDE Bashing". I had to switch my mailing list options to digest I was getting so many emails each day with personal rants.<p>The thing is, Emacs and Vim are awesome, and they are "huge" programs. Also, they are "extremely" flexible, so one persons preferences might be way different than the others. For example, the blog post here uses MacVim and GVim? That's crazy talk (IMHO).<p>RTFM!

Poor article in the sense that it does little more than list out the plugins, rather than providing some commentary on how each plugin improves productivity.

The headline is cheerful, ironic attention-grabbing; the writer acknowledges text editor choice is a preference, then lays out briefly how to set up vim for RoR development.

The thing that always gets me when trying to use either vim and emacs for IDE-like programming (and don't get me wrong...I have used vim for regular editing for years), is that someone says, "yeah, (vim|emacs) destroys all other editors and IDEs. You just need to install this list of 400 plugins, write some elisp to configure it, learn each of these 200 keystrokes, understand where the plugins overlap and contradict, and you're golden".<p>Versus, download Eclipse/Netbeans, open, and start coding.<p>I <i>want</i> to use vim as an IDE...I just don't have the time.

I too use tabstop=2<p>But `cat` uglifies it, so I added this to ~/.bashrc:<p><pre><code> alias tab='sed "s/\t/ /g" ' </code></pre> You needn't say "cat myfile | tab"; you can just use it exactly like cat: "tab myfile" (I'm not saying that <i>you'd</i> not instantly realize that - but that I didn't).

The main reason for the post was that at Hashrocket we benefit from real-time streaming Vim plugins courtesy of Tim Pope and wanted to share how awesome it can be as a Rails editor. I plan to follow up with more on the individual plugins themselves. It would've been a small novel to try and cover each of the plugins themselves in any detail. Most have a solid README on the project page for starters.

I thought the article was worth while if only for pointing me at various plugins I wasn't aware of. If you're a vim hardcore then this is probably nothing new... but for others who are not it seemed useful. I agree that having some more info on why these plugins are useful would be nice, but following the links was easy enough to see if the plugin was interesting.

I expected to see a bit more of how to use all those plugins. But I suppose a list of them is better than nothing.

+ for mentioning all tpope's plugins/bundles.<p>- for some poor suggestions.

Cream is a good VIM editor on Windows.

VIM DESTROYS ALL EDITORS PERIOD