I Code With Things and Stuff

For Clojure specifically, the Rainbow Parens addon for vim is fantastic. Also I've found using GNU screen to split a terminal with one half vim and the other half a REPL to be Good Enough for a lot of purposes.<p>I was also going to mention a few other useful Lispy things you can do with vim (like d% to delete an expression), but this page covers them pretty well: <a href="http://cybertiggyr.com/15-vim/" rel="nofollow">http://cybertiggyr.com/15-vim/</a>

Does anyone know of a modal editor that has an actual scripting language (i.e. better than VimL) behind it?<p>I'm not satisfied with:<p>* tcl/ruby/python interfaces to Vim, because they're horrifically documented, and plugins using these are difficult to distribute<p>* Re-implementations of a subset of Vim's mountain of hacks in a different language (see jsvim, et al)

This story parallels my own on a nearly-disturbing number of levels. Exactly the same experience. I never thought I'd switch from emacs, then I finally gave vim a good shot (switched for two weeks and made a very conscious effort to use it effectively), and was blown away by how much faster I could edit text.

RE: "the operating system’s Open File dialog."<p>I'm a MacVim guy. When working on a project, I exclusively use FuzzyFinder_TextMate and the :edit command. Occasionally I still use cmd+o (primarily when I want to do a one-off file edit and know where the file is "visually" relative to my DropBox folder or something)<p>Anyway: Here's a Mac tip!<p>In the native file chooser dialog, simply type ~ or / and the "Go to folder" sub-dialog will slide down and you can type a path! It even has (very primitive) tab completion.

I like Vim but using Clojure forces you to deal with Java at some point - and having auto complete is crucial to me. VimClojure isn't really good in advanced functionality, eg. autocomplete is clunky and runing things in REPL can block VIM if your REPL command blocks. I couldn't even get emacs to work with Clojure and I don't like the CTR+* interface so I didn't spend much time on it. In the end IntellJ + La Clojure + Lein plugin + IdeaVim works perfect, you have a good REPL, autocomplete and debugging.

I would move from EMACS to Vim quite easily (I was a Vim user before I started learning Clojure) and I mirror the authors thoughts about just using SLIME as an in-editor REPL.<p>The problem for me is the fact that the SLIME REPL offers pretty decent tab-completion<p>Whereas lein-repl doesn't.<p>That's the only thing that's sort of keeping me on the EMACS side of the fence