Thursday, April 7, 2011

Re: Any non-programmer users of Vim here?

On Apr 07, 2011 at 04:15 PM -0400, Eric Weir wrote:
>Still, as I imagine many are, I'm a bit intimidated complexity of the
>commands and the steep learning curve. So, I'm wondering if there are any
>ordinary, nonprogrammer writers here who've gotten comfortable with Vim as a
>writer's editor -- or is that just ridiculous to think of?

I'm not a hardcore programmer, but I do use vim and other tools for technical
stuff. If you really are not doing anything programming or technical related,
and just looking for a plain text editor, I might recommend looking at some
other options. Not that you couldn't get along with vim, but there are other
tools out there that might be a little easier to get at first. And if you
don't need all of the power of vim, why not use something a bit easier to
learn?

With that thought, I'd recommend looking at BBEdit (or it's free 'light'
version, Textwrangler) or Textmate. Though these programs don't have the
modal nature of vim, you can do most if not all of your work in them all
through the keyboard: selecting text, find and replace, general text
modification, etc. Of course try out MacVim too along side the other two.

I'm a long time user of BBEdit and have been very happy with it. The support
is great and it has a great manual. It doesn't have quite all the power,
features, or customizability of vim, but it is pretty easy to dive in and use
it as a simple plain text editor with no real learning curve. And if you want
more, there is plenty there.

--
You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist.
Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php

No comments: