Friday, November 07, 2008

Another one trying to come back to vim. I sense a theme.

Just saw this post today, about another person trying out switching from TextMate back to their first love: VIM. He switched back to TextMate, and I can understand his reasons. Plugins in Vim do tend to feel 'bolted on', and they can be kinda slow. Although you can certainly customize Vim so that it fits your work requirements, many times I think we all have to customize it for our own needs because, out of the box, its not doing what we need.

This makes me think of cream, a distribution of Vim customized for non-Vim users, in the mode of word processing.

We need some other distribution out there that tightly integrates some of the really amazing plugins that are out there. A cream-for-programmers who know the power of TextMate, IntelliJ, etc.

One thing that might make also go into this soup...has anyone out there noticed the 'netbeans' extension to vim? I've seen the switch and read about what it was supposed to do - tightly integrate Vim on top of netbeans...so you can harness the power of netbeans inside Vim. Fancy icons in the gutters, cool refactoring features of netbeans in Vim. I'm only guessing here, but thats what I *think* the netbeans integration was supposed to have provided. There are certain automagical properties of the big battleship IDEs that Vim just isn't meant to provide...but perhaps providing a way to interface with them would bring those 'other IDE' users back into the fold.

Eh...I don't know. Personally, a kickass tightly integrated distribution of vim with existing plugins would make me happy ... the IDE integration really seems like overkill. But...who knows.