20 Years of VIM

VIM has now been out for 20 years. Ars has a nice article on it. It is my editor of choice on *nix based systems, but things weren't always that way. I remember when I first used vim (it may have even been an earlier clone, but probably not vi itself) , I hated it - it didn't make any sense. I was in highschool at the time, probably 14 years old. At the time I used pico since it was similar to MSDOS' EDIT.

It wasn't until I was in college that I truly got an appreciation for vim. I saw one of my professors using it to write code, and he was so incredibly fast it amazed me. It got me interested in how to use vim. Once you take the time to learn a few things about how it works, it's very useful. I still am a vim novice, I know enough to "miss" certain features when I am not using vim, but not enough to be a jedi master of vim (I'm a long ways away from that).

I'm going to take this anniversary as an opportunity to learn some new tricks in VIM. I wouldn't be surprised if I sum up some of the most frequent commands I use in a future post.

While I don't think software should generally have a steep learning curve, in the context of an editor for highly technical users, it makes sense to invest your time really learning an editor. The Pragmatic Programmer tells us to Use A Single Editor Well for a reason - there are real productivity benefits. I'm curious how many users take the time to learn an advanced editor like vim, emacs, or the ins and outs of something like Textmate. 


I think being under active development after 20 years is a pretty awesome accomplishment in software. How many projects have that kind of life span these days? A toast to you, VIM! To another 20 years of active development!

Replacing Notepad with Notepad2

I've been using Notepad2 as a light-weight replacement for the notepad.exe that comes with Windows for several years. Let's face it, the original notepad.exe falls short on many levels - no auto-tab, no multi-line tabbing/untabbing, poor line endings support to start... I've always felt it was inferior to even the old MS-DOS EDIT, which is a pretty sad statement. In comes Notepad2, fixing all of its shortcomings while remaining lightweight, and adding some other nice features as well.



It's always been somewhat of a pain to perform the replacement to Notepad2, since notepad.exe is considered a protected operating system file in XP and Windows 7. Fortunately, Kai Liu wrote an installer that does this for you automatically! I just learned about this this week and figured I would share.




To download the installer, just go to http://code.kliu.org/misc/notepad2/ and scroll to the bottom, "Custom Notepad2 Builds", for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.