Hello,
So Vim is a very powerful editing tool and has lots and lots of potential in regarding plug-ins.
It has years and years of gathered knowledge and extensions and can virtually do anything you want. But that’s not even it’s final form.
The real power of Vim lies in navigation and manipulation. The ability to navigate and edit without the use of arrow keys or mouse chops of a large portion of your time which you didn’t even realize you are wasting until you try it without it.
The one thing people are seem to miss regarding this editor is that you are not supposed to stay in Edit mode all the time. You are supposed to be in Control mode most of times and enter in to Edit for sort bursts. And one more thing is that commands are supposed to be used together. For example deleting a word is very easy and can be achieved in multiple ways. The easiest is combining Delete + Go to the end of a word like this: “de”. So once you are in Control mode you navigate to a word and press d + e. d => Delete a word until new cursor and e => go to the end of the word. Hence “de” will delete a whole word. Awesome.
Handling text is easy as goblin pie and there lots and lots of tutorials and blogs on the web which tell you in detail how to do that so I’m not going to go do that. It does take some time to get used to it because you are wired to handle the mouse and use the arrow keys. But once you start using h j k l and x X and w and $ ^ you realize you don’t need the mouse or the arrow keys to get around.
And it’s much faster since your hand is already there. And suddenly you are using Vimium the Vim extension for Chrome and you find yourself saying. “Where were you all my life?”.
Vim has a mirriad of plugins ready to be used most popular being NerdTree, Vundle and Syntastic for compile errors. And it has a large community to back it up and people who will eagerly help you on your way and pass on tips to understand the logic behind it and the phylosophy.
So all in all it’s a powerful editing tool and a neat friend along the way and completely free of any charge or license. It can be used for anything you want including macros and key phrase replacements where you type two characters which will be replaced with something that you use commonly like public static void main.
I hope this got you a watery mouth towards trying. The only thing I can say is to not give up after 20 minutes you will get a feel for it and you will fall in love with it immediately.
As always,
Thanks for reading!
Gergely.