There is no overwhelmingly reasonable reason I chose vim. Several years ago, when I first started programming on a significant basis, I started reading about the editor wars, and I immediately knew I had to make a choice and stick with it. I think the article that stands out as the main reason for my choice is this one:
Pirates and ninjas: Emacs or Vi?"
Of all the articles that could have been the basis for my choice, this is probably one of the least reasonable. However, when I did read this article, I didn't know anything about what would be useful when programming. And so, connecting both editors to ninjas and pirates made it easy to make a choice (which, I think, matters not that much in the long run anyway).
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| Vim: for when cannons and cutlasses just won't cut it. |
(Short aside: When I read the above article, I didn't know who Richard Stallman was. However, as it turns out, if I had known, there would have been more of an incentive to choose vim.)
Both editors benefit from plugins. I haven't manually installed many - I think the only ones I currently have installed is the fugitive plugin, written by Tim Pope, and the python indent script written by Eric McSween. I will elaborate on the former in a later post.
Of course, knowing the commands available to you is also something that makes you effective, whichever editor you use. I don't know a tenth of all the stuff that vim can do in theory, but this Stack Exchange question was a lot of help to me.
There are a couple of keybindings I find very helpful. Mapping caps lock to ESC, 't to :tabnew, 's to :w and 'q to :q are some that save plenty of keystrokes in the long run.
The more you use an editor, the better you get at it and the less you gain by switching. So it's likely I will keep using vim for the unforeseeable future. And that's ok.
