Fugitive.vim

All of my posts presently are written in the nick of time. It could be symptomatic of either bad planning or too much to do, but I will try to keep up the current schedule for a while longer at least.

As stated in another post, one of the plugins I am using for vim is the fugitive.vim plugin, written by Tim Pope. Its description is "A Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal". And so far, I have to agree - it is pretty darn awesome.

My favorite feature so far is the :Gdiff mode. It has done wonders to the tidyness of my git history. Used to be, I would edit a file, spot a minor bug that was unrelated to whatever I was currently implementing, and then I had to either a)fix the bug and implement whatever, commiting everything in one large chunk, thus messing up the Git history, or b) stash the changes so far, fix the bug, commit it, then continue implementing.

Option b) isn't actually that bad in itself. It just takes a little more time. However, if you spot multiple bugs, or do several separate modifications of the file, the stashing can get a little messy.

Now, the Gdiff command opens up the file you're editing together with the current HEAD version of that file. (Or actually, that's not exactly what is opened, but I have to research more about how Git does stuff before I have more to say). It opens these two files in Diff mode (which I didn't even know about prior to this). It then allows you to choose hunks to stage for a commit, so that you don't have to commit everything in the file at once, if you don't want to. (A hunk is one continuous piece of changed 'stuff'). However, you can even break up the hunks by specifying the lines you want to 'diffput'.

In short - it's awesome. It has other neat features as well, but those will have to come at another time. I might also write a more technical piece on the Gdiff thing.

Vim

I use vim for editing.

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).

Vim: for when cannons and cutlasses just won't cut it.

Ninjas simply appeals more to me than pirates do, and knowing nothing else, I chose vim. I cannot say I regret the choice, but that could easily be just because I haven't tried emacs.

(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.