I've been playing with Vim off and on for more than two years. Well, yesterday I decided that I need to take a more serious approach to learning it.
I have set MacVim (mvim) as my shell editor and as my Git editor, replacing TextMate 2 (mate).
→ echo $EDITOR mvim -f --nomru -c "au VimLeave Gemfile Gemfile.lock axle.rb public views !open -a Terminal"
→ git config --global core.editor
mvim -f --nomru -c "au VimLeave * !open -a Terminal"
Now, when composing merge messages (I have a shell function that makes it easier to write commit messages from the command line, https://github.com/jedfoster/dotfiles/blob/master/bash/aliases#L62-L73) or interactively rebasing, I'll be using MacVim.
I have a cheat sheet which I have printed and hung near my desk. I expect I will be looking at it a lot over the next few weeks.
These are the links I found most helpful as I was setting up MacVim:
- MacVim and gvimrc by example
- Railscasts TextMate theme for Vim
- scrooloose / nerdtree
- tpope / vim-pathogen
- tpope / vim-fugitive
Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent Vim port of the TextMate theme I've been using since 2006. The Railscasts theme is completely different, but still feels right. We'll see how it does long-term.
These other resources have either been useful to me in the past as I've played with Vim or look like they will be useful in the future:
- Smash Into Vim - screencast
- Smash Into Vim II - screencast
- Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong
- MacVIM as TextMate replacement
- From TextMate to VIM for Rails Coders
- Moving Your Mind Into Vim Mode
For at least the next month I'm going to treat MacVim mostly as I would a native text editor; I'm still going to use my mouse and I'll probably use most of the familiar OS shortcuts like Command-S, Command-N and Command-O. I'm not going to stress about learning all shortcuts and magic incantations; I'm focused on the basics: saving files, getting in an out of various modes, and rudimentary navigation. And I'm only going to use it as an adjunct to TextMate.
I expect that one day I'll wake up and realize that I've been using Vim for all my text editing. But that probably won't be tomorrow.